Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. ix. of Necessity. 241
causes alike of His own arbitrary arid sovereign creation.
He produced the motions of the physical world by neces
sary, the motions of the human will by voluntary causes ;
but these voluntary causes were set in motion by Himself;
(rod was the cause of the will. 1 The aims, the designs,
the deliberations, and the acts of man were subjected to
the Divine Will, as being derived ultimately from it ; and
man s providence was contained under the Divine, as the
2
particular cause under the universal.
Such was the logical consequence of the idea of the
Divine power, as regards the human will. Under the no
tion of the will, as a mediate cause, the Augustinian
schoolmen left out no function, action, or characteristic of
will of which the human soul is conscious. They acknow
ledged every internal act and sensation which belongs to
us as having and exercising will ; that which every reason
able man who does not deny the plainest facts must admit.
and ex
They brought all these characteristics to a point,
pressed them in one term self-motion. The will moved
itself, was the cause of its own motion, the mistress of its
own acts ; it was in its power to will or not to will. Man
moved himself to action by his freewill. But this selfmotion
was only admitted as an internal impression, and
was not allowed to counteract or modify the dominant
position of one absolute causality. The will was a prin
ciple of motion to itself; but it was not, therefore, the
first principle of such motion, it did not follow that this
principle of motion was not itself set in motion by some
thing else. The will was the internal principle of its own
motion ; but this self-determining power moved the will
as causa proxima, not as causa prima ; the internal
principle was only a secondary one, succeeding to a first
principle, which was external to the will. The will, though
it moved itself, was moved ab alio to this motion. Nor
1
Voluntatis causa nihil aliud
2 Providentia hominis contiesse
potest quam Deus. Sum. netur sub Theol. I* 2
providentia Dei sicut
dae Q. 10. Art. 6. Deus particularis causa sub causa uni-
est causa prima movens et naturales versali. Sum. Theol. I"* Q. 23.
causas et voluntarias. l ma Q. 83. Art. 2.
Art. 1.