Wesley Corpus

To have seen himself a part of that great machine would have been altogether incongruous to the ends he was to fulfil. Had he seen that nothing was contingent, there would have been no room for forethought, nor for any sort of industry or care. Reason could not have been exercised in the way it is now; that is, man could not have been man. But now, the moment he comes into the world, he acts as a free agent. And contingency, though it has no real existence in things, is made to appear as really existing. Thus is our natural feeling directly opposite to truth and matter of fact; seeing it is certainly impossible, that any man should act any otherwise than he does.” See necessity drawn at full length, and painted in the most lively colours! II. 1. It is easy to observe, that every one of these schemes implies the universal necessity of human actions. In this they all agree, that man is not a free but a necessary agent, being absolutely determined in all his actions by a principle exterior to himself. But they do not agree what that principle is. The most ancient of them, the Manichaean, maintained, that men are determined to evil by the evil god, Arimanius; that Oromasdes, the good God, would have prevented or removed that evil, but could not; the power of the evil god.’ being so great, that he is not able to control it. 2. The Stoics, on the other hand, did not impute the evil that is in the world to any intelligent principle, but either to the original stubbornness of matter, which even divine power was not capable of removing; to the concatenation of causes and effects, which no power whatever could alter; or to unconquerable fate, to which they supposed all the gods, the Supreme not excepted, to be subject. 3. The author of two volumes, entitled “Man,” rationally rejects all the preceding schemes, while he deduces all human actions from those passions and judgments which, during the present union of the soul and body, necessarily result from such and such vibrations of the fibres of the brain.