Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note V.
335
agency, only apparently original, and really produced by a
cause beyond itself? Would not his internal sensations
appear upon such a view to him a spurious outside, a kind
of semblance and sham, pretending something which was
not really true, and deluding him into thinking that he
was an original agent when he really was not ?
While, then, I fully admit, in addition to these ideas
and sensations of originality and free agency, other ideas
counter to them another side of the human mind to
which philosophy and theology have alike
legitimately
appealed, and without which neither necessarianism nor
the doctrine of original sin would have arisen I cannot
think that Mr. Mill does justice to these ideas these
true perceptions, it appears to me, as far as they go of
our originality as agents.
Hume s argument on Liberty and Necessity is a
summary
very
one. He does not, as Mr. Mill, in the first
instance, appears to do, from the observed fact of causa
tion or necessity in the physical world, presume the same
thing in the moral he ; boldly appeals at once to what
he considers to be an obvious and plain fact of observa
tion. He considers necessity, or the law of antecedent
and consequent, to be as plain and obvious in the case of
human actions as it is in the events of material nature.
Our idea, he says, of necessity or causation arises en
tirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of
nature. Where similar objects are constantly conjoined
together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer
the one from the appearance
of the other, these two cir
cumstances form the whole of that necessity which we
ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of
similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to
the other, we have no idea of any necessity of connexion.
If it appear, therefore, that all mankind have ever allowed,
without any doubt or hesitation, that these two circum
stances take place in the voluntary actions of men, and in
the operations of mind, it must follow that all mankind
have ever agreed in the doctrine of necessity, and that