Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

The Argument
CHAP. T.
The fatalist takes the general ground that every event must
have a cause and it ; applying to the case of human actions,
argues that just as the action must have a cause, so that
cause, even if we say it is the will s own choice, must have
itself a cause; this further cause another cause. Being
thus provided with an unlimited series of causes in the case
of every human action, while the past existence of the agent
is limited, he extends this series backwards till it reaches
a point at which it goes outside of the agent ; who is con
sequently proved to have acted ultimately from causes over
which he had no control.
There is another kind of necessitarianism, again, which
takes for its basis, instead of a physical assumption, like
the one just mentioned, a religious one the attribute of
the Divine power ; and argues downwards from the First
Cause, instead of backwards from human action. To the
metaphysician who believes in a Creator or First Cause,
and who contemplates man in relation to that Being, one
great and primary difficulty presents itself in the question
how a being can be a creature, and yet have freewill, and
be a spring of action to himself, a self-moving being. Our
very notion of cause and effect is of the cause as active, the
effect as passive ; and, therefore, if man is an effect, how
is he an active being ? A tool or instrument that we make,
issues inert out of our hands, and only capable of that
motion which the maker of it gives it. To make a machine
is to cause the whole series of motions which it performs.
Our idea of creation is thus at variance with the idea of
free agency in the thing made. Man as a self-moving
being and the originator of his own acts, is a first cause in
nature but how ; can we acknowledge a second first cause
1
a first cause which is an effect, a created originality?
Of course the fact of moral evil is at once an answer
to this line of argument ;
so far, at any rate, as to disprove
the cogency and decisiveness of it. For unless we make
1 If man be a self-determining as there are men in the world?
agent, will it not necessarily follow, Toplady, vol. vi. p. 31. If I am an
that there are as many First Causes independent animal, I am also neces*
(i.e in other words, as many Gods) sarily self-existent. p. 4o.