Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note V.
337
No argument on the side of necessity in human actions
can be simpler than this ; and if there is any weight in it,
the question is decided beyond controversy ;
for it is simply
an appeal to our observation that such is the case, an asser
tion that necessity is as visible in human actions as it is
in the events of nature. But any reader of common intel
ligence must see at once a fundamental error underlying
this whole argument, which entirely deprives it of force.
The uniformity which the writer observes in human life
and conduct applies to mankind as a whole ; while the
principle of necessity can only be properly tested by the
conduct of men as individuals. On the common doctrine
of chances, mankind as a whole will be much the same in
one generation and age of the world that it is in another ;
i.e. there will be the same proportion of good to bad men,
the same relative amount of selfish and disinterested, gene
rous and mean, courageous and cowardly, independent and
servile characters. But the doctrine of necessity is con
cerned with the individual cases which compose this general
and the question upon which
average of human character ;
that doctrine turns is, whether individuals with the same
antecedents i.e. the same inducements, external and in
ternal, to particular conduct have uniformly acted in the
same way. The sum total may be the same, but the ques
tion of is necessity concerned with the units which compose
that sum. Have the individuals who have been bad and
good, selfish and disinterested, been so in conjunction
with
different respective sets of antecedents i.e. different cir
;
cumstances, education and natural temperament ? Or, have
not persons under apparently
the same circumstances,
education, and natural temperament, turned out very
differently ? The latter is certainly the more natural ob
servation of the two. But if we are forbidden to make it,
and reminded that we do not know all the antecedents,
circumstances, and motives, internal and external, to con
duct, in the case of individuals ; then at any rate nobody
can pretend to have made the contrary observation, or pro
fess to have noted a uniform of antecedents
conjunction
and consequents in the case of human action. And with