No More Learning

' The actions of the will have a regular
conjunction with circumstances and characters; motive is to voluntary
action what cause is to effect. But the only idea we can form of
causation is a constant conjunction of similar objects, and the
consequent inference of one from the other: wherever this is the case
necessity is clearly established.

The idea of liberty, applied metaphorically to the will, has sprung from
a misconception of the meaning of the word power. What is power? --id
quod potest, that which can produce any given effect. To deny power is
to say that nothing can or has the power to be or act. In the only true
sense of the word power, it applies with equal force to the lodestone as
to the human will. Do you think these motives, which I shall present,
are powerful enough to rouse him? is a question just as common as, Do
you think this lever has the power of raising this weight? The advocates
of free-will assert that the will has the power of refusing to be
determined by the strongest motive; but the strongest motive is that
which, overcoming all others, ultimately prevails; this assertion
therefore amounts to a denial of the will being ultimately determined by
that motive which does determine it, which is absurd. But it is equally
certain that a man cannot resist the strongest motive as that he cannot
overcome a physical impossibility.

The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the
established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward
and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives
which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of
any given line of conduct. Desert, in the present sense of the word,
would no longer have any meaning; and he who should inflict pain upon
another for no better reason than that he deserved it, would only
gratify his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice? It is not
enough, says the advocate of free-will, that a criminal should be
prevented from a repetition of his crime: he should feel pain, and his
torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to
his fault.
But utility is morality; that which is incapable of producing
happiness is useless; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned,
yet the frightful torments which revenge, under the name of justice,
inflicted on this unhappy man cannot be supposed to have augmented, even
at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world. At the
same time, the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our
disapprobation of vice. The conviction which all feel that a viper is a
poisonous animal, and that a tiger is constrained, by the inevitable
condition of his existence, to devour men, does not induce us to avoid
them lass sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in destroying them: but
he would surely be of a hard heart who, meeting with a serpent on a
desert island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury,
should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessarian is inconsequent
to his own principles if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the
compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of
injuring him: he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the
links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes; whilst
cowardice, curiosity, and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to
the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and
rejected the delusions of free-will.

Religion is the perception of the relation in which we stand to the
principle of the universe. But if the principle of the universe be not
an organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between
it and human beings is absolutely none. Without some insight into its
will respecting our actions religion is nugatory and vain. But will is
only a mode of animal mind; moral qualities also are such as only a
human being can possess; to attribute them to the principle of the
universe is to annex to it properties incompatible with any possible
definition of its nature. It is probable that the word God was
originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known
events which men perceived in the universe. By the vulgar mistake of a
metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man,
endowed with human qualities and governing the universe as an earthly
monarch governs his kingdom. Their addresses to this imaginary being,
indeed, are much in the same style as those of subjects to a king. They
acknowledge his benevolence, deprecate his anger, and supplicate his
favour.

But the doctrine of Necessity teaches us that in no case could any event
have happened otherwise than it did happen, and that, if God is the
author of good, He is also the author of evil; that, if He is entitled
to our gratitude for the one, He is entitled to our hatred for the
other; that, admitting the existence of this hypothetic being, He is
also subjected to the dominion of an immutable necessity. It is plain
that the same arguments which prove that God is the author of food,
light, and life, prove Him also to be the author of poison, darkness,
and death. The wide-wasting earthquake, the storm, the battle, and the
tyranny, are attributable to this hypothetic being in the same degree as
the fairest forms of nature, sunshine, liberty, and peace.

But we are taught, by the doctrine of Necessity, that there is neither
good nor evil in the universe, otherwise than as the events to which we
apply these epithets have relation to our own peculiar mode of being.