it. Little, in fact, of moment has been added by modern determinists.” Similar is the testimony of Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on Philosophy prefixed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Collins, he says, “following the footsteps of Hobbes, with logical talents not inferior to his master, and with a weight of personal character in his favor, to which his master had no pretensions,[1] gave to the cause which he so warmly espoused a degree of credit among sober and serious inquirers which it had never before possessed in England. . . . Indeed, I do not know of anything that has been advanced by later writers in support of the scheme of Necessity, of which the germ is not to be found in the inquiry of Collins.”
In France the works of Collins had a notable influence on the progress of philosophical ideas. His letters in the Clarke and Dodwell controversy were collected and published (probably by d’Holbach) in 1769 as Essai sur la nature et la destination de l’âme Humaine, They were also reprinted in Naigeon’s eulogistic article on Collins in the dictionary of ancient and modern philosophy of the Encyclopédie Méthodique. This also reprinted the work here published, of which two translations had previously been made—one by De Bons, published by Des Maizeaux in his Recueil de Diverses Pièces sur la Philosophie, la Religion, etc. (Amsterdam, 1720), and the other, that used by Naigeon, translated by Lefèvre de Beauvray, published in 1754 as Paradoxes Metaphysiques sur les Principes des Actions Humaines. Voltaire, in his Letters on authors accused of attacking the Christian religion, calls Collins “one of the most terrible enemies of the Christian religion.”
There has been some controversy raised as to whether Collins’s arguments for Necessity do not lead in the direction of Atheism. As if aware of this, he points out that the Epicurians asserted, Liberty, while it was denied by the theistic Stoics. He argues, too, that free-will is inconsistent with the omnipotence ascribed
- ↑ In a footnote Professor Stewart explains that “I allude to the base servility of Hobbes’ political principles, and to the suppleness with which he adapted them to the opposite idea.” “To his private virtues the most honorable testimony has been borne, both by his friends and by his enemies.”
