be assailed, it has been diffused through a treatise of considerable size. The fundamental assumption of the whole book is the unlimited application of the law of causation, and the consequent existence of an infinite succession of derived causes or antecedents. The phenomenon to be thereby explained is the origin of our rational and responsible volitions. On the hypothesis assailed by Edwards, these acts of will are accounted for in each case by means of the assumption of a previous determination of the will itself, which was asserted to be possessed of the power of self-determination. The inconsistency of this explanation is clearly demonstrated in the first section of the second part of the “Inquiry,” which may be regarded as a summary of the argument which the modern antagonists of liberty are accustomed to present as an unassailable defence of a scheme of universal necessity, in which all acts of will, Divine as well as human, are included.
The series of syllogisms contained in the passage to which we have referred is irrefragable as against the conceptions of free-will at which it is pointed, if indeed an hypothesis of liberty such as is there assailed was ever distinctly maintained by any philosophical theologian of repute. But in truth, although the defenders of freedom have united against fatalism, they are far from being lucid or unanimous in the statement of their own doctrine. Even Reid’s writings on free-will can hardly be made to yield a consistent theory.
The most important advance, as it seems to us, that has been made by Sir William Hamilton, in the discus
