emotions, passions, and sentiments from the lyre of Timotheus, is a figurative, but accurately true, representation of every man every moment of his existence: "Nous sommes tous des instrumens passifs entre les mains de la destinée*."

I am aware that to maintain the doctrine of necessity furnishes those, who are fonder of declaiming than of reasoning, with a plausible occasion for inveighing against its most erroneously supposed tendency to degrade the dignity of human nature. But with declamations I have nothing to do ;however indignant, pathetic, or sublime, they prove just nothing.

Many people are deluded on this subject by an opinion that the tendency of the doctrine of necessity degrades man from

* Diderot.

the character of a free agent to that of a slave. If I believed this to be the real tendency of the doctrine, no argument that the wit of man could devise should make me a convert to it, or shake my conviction that there must be a fallacy, whether I could detect it or not, in the reasoning that really degraded a being made in the image of God. But let me ask the advocates for the free agency of man, what they mean by a slave? Do they not mean a man without any possibility of escaping punishment, to be inflicted at the discretion of a master of unlimited and irresistible power over him, for neglecting to perform the task prescribed to him in the manner and at the time in which he is ordered? And does not every stickler for the dignity of his free agency, who is not an absolute atheist, acknowledge himself to be precisely in these circumstances?

"Whose freedom is by suff'rance, and at will
Of a superior, he is never free*.”

Poor human nature, with what shallow delusions does it impose on itself!

* Cowper.

LETTER VII.

THE obvious impossibility of matter moving or resting of itself, or, when in motion, moving with any degree of velocity, or in any possible direction other than that communicated to it by some external and of it independent agent,-and the impossibility of matter having any choice which of two or more contrary forces it will obey, -have driven the advocates of free will to the necessity of fancying that the mind of man is composed of some substance wholly unlike any of which it is possible for that mind to form any conception,—of something to which they have given the name of spirit. And for this whimsical opinion

they have not the shadow of any authority, excepting the following syllogism:

Matter cannot think—

The mind of a man does think.
Ergo-The mind of a man is a spirit.

Now granting the assumed but unproved possibility of the existence of an immaterial spirit (though I confess that the only idea that I can possibly form of a spirit, is of a very refined, rarified, or subtilized matter,) I deny that we have any authority for supposing that such a spirit does exist: and before any man is warranted to assert that matter cannot think, he must know every possible result of every possible combination of matter in all possible circumstances. Now those combinations, exclusive of their results, being clearly infinite, nothing but infinite intelligence can possibly comprehend them. Surely no man that ever existed has known all the possible results of