Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Augustinian Doctrine CHAP. YUI.
which has respect to the existence of the will, and the
other to the mode in which it is moved and determined.
That part which respects the existence of the will, the
doctrine of freewill, and the contrary doctrine, hold in
common. No person in his senses can deny the fact of the
will, that we will to do this, that, and the other thing, that
we act with intention, design, deliberation. We are directly
conscious of all this. No predestinarian, therefore, how
ever rigid, denies it and the whole set of sensations which
;
are connected with willing, or the whole fact of the will, in
its minutest and most subtle is
particulars, the common
ground both of him and his opponent. But the fact of the
will admitted, the further question remains, how this will
is determined ; that is, caused to decide on one side or
another, and choose this or that act. The doctrine of
freewill is that the cause of this decision is the will itself,
and that the will has a power of self-determination inhe
rent in it. This appears to the maintainers of this doc
trine the natural inference from that whole fact of willing,
of which they are conscious, so that they could not draw
any other without seeming to themselves to contradict
plain reason. Nobody can assert indeed that he is con
scious distinctly, and after the mode of clear perception,
of a power of determining his own will, for all that he is
distinctly conscious of is his will itself. Nevertheless, the
will as we feel and experience it, acting with struggle,
effort, resolution, summoning up of force, and deliberate
choice of alternatives, has so much the appearance of being
self-determining and original, that when the notion is sug
gested that it is not, such a notion is felt to be contrary
to an idea which we naturally and instinctively have re
specting our will, its originality appearing to be implied
in this kind of motion and operation. Nor is this selfdetermining
power of the will interfered with by the doc
trine of
assisting grace, which is so formed as to admit the
human will as an original agent, co-operating with grace.
The doctrine of freewill, then, is that the will is deter
mined by itself, or is an original agent, as distinguished
from the assertion simply of a will in man, which latter it