appearance of one action as performed by his neighbour, could infer a second, or form any opinion of his character. And even the doctrine of divine prescience must be entirely relinquished; since, without such a necessary and consecutive connection, it must be impossible for the Deity himself to foresee any future event, or to know it otherwise than as it occurs at the moment.

It was not my intention to have touched upon this controversy, but the principles upon which it hinges are so closely blended with the subject before us, that it is impossible altogether to elude it, though the remarks I propose to offer shall be as brief and compressed as I am able to make them.

In the first place, then, whatever be the necessary connection between motives, volitions, and actions, it is by no means true that they are "subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter." Let me support this assertion by a reference to a few simple facts. A needle, or an iron ball, placed betwixt two magnets of equal power, will fall to neither of them, but remain midway at rest for ever, suspended between equally contending attractions. Now, if the same laws of necessity control the moral as control the physical world, a similar moral cause must produce a similar moral effect; and the traveller who, by accident, after having lost himself in a forest, should meet with two roads running in opposite or different directions,

and offering in every respect an equal attraction, must, like the needle or bullet, remain for ever at rest, because the motive to take one course is just equipoised by the motive to take the other. But can any man in his senses suppose he would remain there for ever, and so starve himself between equally contending attractions? Or rather, can any man suppose such a fact, provided the traveller himself, were in his senses? Yet Montaigne, in support of this hypothesis, has actually supposed such a fact, and has put forth the following whimsical or facetious example: "Where the mind," says he, "is at the same time equally influenced by two equal desires, it is certain it can never comply with either of them, because a consent and preference would evince a dissimilarity in their value. If a man should

chance to be placed between a bottle of wine and a Westphalia ham, with an equal inclination to eat and to drink, there could, in this case, be no possible remedy; and by the law of necessity he must die either of hunger or thirst. The Stoics, therefore," continues he, "who were most rigidly attached to the doctrine of fatalism, when asked how the mind determines when two objects of equal desire are presented to it, or what is the reason that out of a number of crown pieces it selects one rather than another, there being no motive to excite a preference, reply, that this action of the mind is extraordinary and irregular, and proceeds from an impulse equally irregular and fortuitous. But it would be better," con

tinues Montaigne, in my estimation, "to maintain that no two objects can be presented to us so perfectly equal, but that some trifling difference may subsist, and some small superiority be discoverable either in the one or the other."

And no doubt it would be better to maintain such a position; but, who does not see that this is to give up the question? to renounce the point upon which we are at issue, and openly to confess that there does not exist in the moral world the same counterpoise of cause and cause that is to be perpetually met with in the natural.

Let us confine ourselves to one more example. A cannon-ball, discharged from the centre of a circle, and equally attracted to the north and to the east, will proceed towards neither point; but at an angle of 22 degrees, or immediately between the two. But is there any one, unincumbered with a strait-waistcoat, who can suppose that such a rule has any application to the motive powers of the mind? who can conceive, that a man, starting at Blackfriar's Bridge, and having business so equally urgent at Highgate and at Mile-end, that he is incapable of determining to which place he shall proceed first, would proceed to neither, but take a course between the two, and walk in a straight line to Hackney or Newington Green? Yet, unless he should thus act, not occasionally, or by accident, but uniformly, and at all times, there is not in the mind the same law of operation, the same sort of necessity, as in matter; but a something,

whatever it may be, producing and designed to produce an irreconcilable distinction; and, in the correct language of the Epicurean philosophers, perpetually labouring to prevent the same blind force from vanquishing the one as it leads captive the other:

Ne mens ipsa necessum

Intestinum habeat cunctis in rebus agundis,
ET DEVICTA QUASI, COGATUR FERRE, PATIQUE. *

Lest the mind

Bend to a stern necessity within,

AND, LIKE A SLAVE, DETERMINE BUT BY FORCE.

But we are told, that unless the moral world were thus constituted, there could be no mutual confidence between man and man; no series of actions could be depended upon, and it would be impossible to distinguish between one character and another; or, in other words, how long the same individual would maintain the same character.

Now this kind of argument, if accurately examined, just as much invalidates the doctrine it is intended to support as the preceding. There is no one who pretends to place the same degree of confidence in the general course of human actions as in the experienced train of natural events. Even where the circumstances to reason from are equally definite, moral dependence is in all instances less certain than physical, and never

*De Rer. Nat. ii. 289.

amounts to more than a probability. The closest friendships may fail, the purest virtue become tarnished; and, in the words of Sophocles, which I must beg leave to put into our own language

The power of all things cease; e'en sacred oaths
At times be broke, and the determin'd mind
Forego its steady purpose.

Material causes, on the contrary, are regular in their operations, and uninterrupted in their effects. Nobody doubts that the sun will rise tomorrow; that a cannon-ball will sink in water; or that, if the lamps over our heads were to be extinguished, we should be in darkness. The power of Buonaparte, when in the zenith of his success, was absolute and almost unbounded, but did even this ensure steadiness of conduct? Quite the reverse. We behold the decrees of to-day overthrown by those of to-morrow, and, in the blind and overwhelming career of his ambition, his hosts of blood-hounds that have just plundered his enemies next sent against his friends; we behold every thing in nature, that is within' his reach, tottering and out of joint; while every thing that is beyond and above him continues steadfast and unchangeable; the air is as vital as ever, the seasons as regular in their courses, and, to adopt the beautiful language of our poet laureate