Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note V.
333
any rationale which stopped short of this ? You might
explain to him that his will being caused from without
did not imply any force or coaction, but that he might
have all the sensations of voluntary agency while lie was
still really acting from causes ultimately beyond his own
control ; but such an explanation would not satisfy him.
The feeling he has that he can decide either way in the
case of any proposed action, and the regret or pleasure
that he feels afterwards, according to the use which he has
made of this apparent power, will make him think himself
an original agent, and he will be dissatisfied with any
rationale of his action which stops short of this.
Mr. Mill is indeed sufficiently aware of the strength
of this natural conviction of originality in the human
mind, to be induced to meet and satisfy
its demands as
far as he can in consistency with his theory ; but he can
not, because his theory prevents him, really satisfy them.
He admits, however, for the purpose of satisfying this
claim, that a man can in a certain sense form his own
character, and is an agent acting upon himself, and he
draws a distinction on this head between the necessarian
and the fatalist ; the former of whom, according to him,
allows, in keeping with true philosophy, this agency upon
self, while the latter, carried away by the fallacy that the
certainty of the end supersedes the necessity of the means
"
or subordinate agencies,
denies it. A fatalist believes,
or half believes (for nobody is a consistent fatalist), not
only that whatever is about to happen will be an infallible
result of the causes which produce it is
(which
the true
necessarian doctrine), but, moreover, that there is no use
struggling against it; that it will happen however we
may strive to prevent it. Now, a necessarian believing
that our actions follow from our characters, and that our
characters follow from our our
organisation,
education,
and our circumstances, is apt to be, with more or less of
consciousness on his part,
a fatalist as to his actions, and
to believe that his nature is such, or that his education
and circumstances have so moulded his character, that
nothing can now prevent him from feeling and acting