HKB
their nature. They preclude the very idea of a free-will, and render the feeling of moral responsibility not an enigma merely, not a mystery, but a self-contradiction and an absurdity.
Turn the matter as we will--call these correlatives, namely, the inherent susceptibilities and the causes acting on them from without, natural, or moral, or spiritual--so long as their action and reaction, or the law of reciprocity, which constitutes their specific natures, is considered as the controlling law of our whole being, so long as we refuse to admit the existence in the will of a power capable of rising above this law, and controlling its operation by an act of absolute self-determination, so long we shall be involved in perplexities both in morals and religion. At all events, the only method of avoiding them will be to adopt the creed of the Necessitarians entire, to give man over to an irresponsible nature as a better sort of animal, and resolve the will of the Supreme Reason into a blind and irrational Fate.
I am well aware of the objections that will be made to this statement, and especially the demonstrated incomprehensibleness of a self-determining power. To this I may be permitted to answer, that, admitting the power to originate an act or state of mind may be beyond the capacity of our understandings to comprehend, it is still not contradictory to reason; and that I find it more easy to believe the existence of that which is simply incomprehensible to my understanding, than of that which involves an absurdity for my reason. I venture to affirm, moreover, that however we may bring our understandings into bondage to the more comprehensible doctrine, simply because it is comprehensible under the forms of the understanding, every man does, in fact, believe himself possessed of freedom in the higher sense of self-determination. Every man's conscience commands him to believe it, as the only rational ground of moral responsibility. Every man's conscience, too, betrays the fact that he does believe it, whenever for a moment he indulges the feeling either of moral self-approbation, or of remorse. Nor can we on any other grounds justify the ways of God to man upon the supposition that he inflicts or will inflict any other punishment than that which is simply remedial or disciplinary. But this subject will be found more fully explained in the course of the Work. My present object is merely to show the necessity of some system in relation to these subjects different from the received one.