deep-rooted passion till the due moment arrives for executing the one, or gratifying the other.

Now, in all these cases, the determination of the judgment, which forms the motive or moving power, is as much a voluntary act of the mind, whether right or wrong, as the change of one or more ciphers in a common arithmetical sum, in consequence of our discovering an error upon working it a second time. This determination, or motive, however, may be changed every hour, or even every minute; for the mind may take a new view of the subject it may obtain clearer ideas from fresh sources; or other affections may be called into play than those which have hitherto produced an influence; and what before was decided to be a certain path to pleasure, may next be decided to be as certain a road to misery and ruin.

And so active is the judgment in asserting its control, that even where the mind is borne down by the most violent passions, it still strives, at times, to recover its authority, and is seldom quiet till it has succeeded. Let me offer a single example in elucidation of this assertion.

Behold the enamoured youth, who, after having struggled for years with an unebbing current of obstacles, finds himself, at length, in possession of the fair object of his heart's affection. Here, the reigning power must necessarily be the passion of love, and it would be somewhat cynical to look for any thing else. Ask him in what his happiness consists, and what are the motives that stimulate every action of his life, and he will at once point to his beloved bride, without whom, he will tell you, that all nature would be a blank; and, with whom, that a wilderness would be a paradise. Behold her next, by the stealthy and startling hand of death, snatched away from his embraces. What now is the condition of the mind? the new motives that distract it? and the conduct to which they give rise? Is it possible that an ember of happiness can remain to him now?—Yes, even here, in the rack of anguish, he has still his delight—a lonely and a melancholy one, I am compelled to grant, but he has his delight notwithstanding; and the mind is as much hurried away, and as violently, by the present impulse, which is to weep over her remains, as by the past, which was to devote himself to her wishes :

He haunts the deep cathedral shade,
The green sward where his love is laid,
And hugs her urn, and o'er the tomb
Hangs, and enjoys the specter'd gloom.
And oft to thee he lifts his eye,
Mild express of the spangled sky!
And thanks thy dewy beams, that guide
His footsteps to his clay-cold bride,
And oft he asks the starry train
That circle round thy silver reign,

By which her parting spirit pass'd,
And where she stay'd her flight at last.
He asks-and thither would he go-
For what has nature now below?

Thus far the mind has unquestionably evinced little or no control; and I bring forward these descriptions as instances of its subjugation. But even here, in one of the severest trials with which mankind can be visited, the mind gradually finds the means of recovering its ascendancy; the passions, by degrees become tranquillized, and in their turn subdued; the heart softened, the judgment corrected and fortified, and the reason set at liberty for reflection. The pale sufferer perceives, at length, that happiness, to be genuine, must be neither violent nor transitory: that its foun

dation must be permanent, and its nature unalloyed. He yields himself to this train of contemplation; and the mind, now fully reinstated in its government, indulges a sober and rational grief, and arrives at a sober and rational conclusion. It determines that earth has no such happiness to offer him; it may perhaps lead him further, and prompt him to seek it in a sublimer source.

This description I have drawn from the natural passions of the human heart-passions that, in a greater or less degree, are common to all countries and ages; but there are passions of which uncultivated nature knows nothing, which are the baneful offspring of a morbid civilization and immoral habits, and which possess, if possible, a still more tyrannical control over the judgment than any that nature herself has implanted within it. Such is the passion for GAMBLING, which has often, even in the sobriety of our own climate, maddened the brain of men who, but for this, had been worthy members of society, and plunged them into the foulest vices, and at length, into the deadly gulf of suicide. One of the best pictures of the heart-rending despair of such a wretch, just before the perpetration of this horrible crime, is to be found in the description of Beverley in "The Gamester," who is thus painted to the life, in the inevitable ruin into which he was thrown after having staked the last resource and final hope of his wife and family on one unfortunate and fatal hazard :— "When all was lost, he fixed his eyes upon the ground, and stood some time with folded arms, stupid and motionless; then, snatching his sword that hung against the wainscot, he sat him down, and with a look of fixed attention drew figures on the floor. At last, he started up; looked wild, and trembled ; and, like a woman, seized with her sex's fits, laughed out aloud, while the tears trickled down his face. So he left the room."

Yet, even here, under the fell sway of this accursed incantation, we are not without examples of its being occasionally broken through, and its deadly fetters shaken off by the virtuous resolution of a mind determined to prove its independence, and to act according to the dictates of its better judgment. As an example of which, among many others, I may refer to the conduct of one of the first statesmen of our own country, and our own age; a statesman, whose name will ever be dear to Britain, on various accounts, but chiefly, perhaps, since under his administration, she set the glorious example to the world of abolishing the slave-trade. In early life it is well known that Mr. Fox was irresistibly addicted to this intoxicating passion; and it is also equally known, that in his maturer life, he tore himself from the further prosecution of it, by a courageous determination from which he never departed.

It appears obvious, then, that the mind both can and ought to maintain a general mastery over all its faculties; and is able, at all times, except in extreme cases, to furnish itself with motives. And hence, though it is perfectly true that it cannot will, or, in other words, cannot choose or refuse without a motive, and to this extent is under a necessity, yet the origination or change of motives being vested in itself, it is equally true that it is so far free to will, as well as to act or perform what it wills.

If the distinction here offered had been properly attended to, we should, as I am inclined to think, have had fewer opponents in all ages, to the doctrine of the freedom of the mind, or of the will as it is commonly denominated. Among the chief of these opponents we may rank the Fatalists of ancient, and the Necessarians of modern times.

The general train of argument by which they have been led, and the

い

ground of its adoption, are not essentially different. Motives, volitions, and actions, are supposed by both sects to be of the same nature, in respect to relative force and operation, as physical causes and effects; and consequently, the same catenation, or necessary dependence of one fact upon another, which marks the experienced train of events in the natural world, is conceived to be perpetually taking place in the moral: “All voluntary actions," as Mr. Hume observes, "being subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, and there being a continued chain of necessary causes pre-ordained, and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to every single volition of every human being." Or, as another writer upon the same subject has expressed it, "The course of events, both moral and physical, is fixed and immutable; and thoughts, volitions, and actions, proceed in one interrupted concatenation from the beginning to the end of time, agreeably to the laws originally established by the great Creator."

So that, under the same circumstances the same motives must be produced in the mind of every man, give rise to the same volitions, and be succeeded by the same actions; every one of these, to adopt the language of the Fatalists, being equally a link of that

Golden everlasting chain,

Whose strong embrace holds heaven, and earth, and main.

If it were not so, it is pretended that there could be no mutual dependence or confidence between man and man. No person, from the 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 connexion, 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 connexion 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 between 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 him

* Essays On Liberty and Necessity; vol. ii.

self, 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," continues 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 221 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 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, produced 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 :

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 distin

* De Rer. Nat. ii. 289.

guish 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 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 determined 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 to morrow; 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 tomorrow, 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 over, the seasons as regular in their courses, and, to adopt the beautiful language of our poet laureate

But we are farther told, that unless there be the same fixed and dependent chain established in the moral creation which unquestionably exists in the physical, the Deity himself could have no prescience or foreknowledge of human conduct. And so forcible has this argument appeared to some men, and men too, of acknowledged worth and piety, that in the dilemma into which they have felt themselves thrown, like the Brahmins of the East, they have utterly abandoned the doctrine of divine prescience in favour of that of moral liberty.

Shallow and impotent conclusion! Absurd admission of an hostility that has no existence! as though he who sees through infinite space, is incapable of seeing through the brief duration of time; or as though, like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, the great author of nature stands in need of a thread to guide him through the maze of his own creation, and depends upon every preceding event as a direction-post to that which follows. There are contingencies in the natural as well as in the moral world, though they are far less frequent because far less necessary. Miracles are of this description; they are direct and palpable deviations from the common laws of nature, the common routine of causes and effects; and he who denies that the Deity can know any thing of contingencies, in