Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr.
The reply is, that a necessitarian knowing that a certain education of the human mind was most conducive to human happiness, would strive to impart to his children education of that character.
He adopted and advocated the utilitarian and necessitarian theory of morals, and wrote of ordinary theism and religion, as arising from personification of unknown causes, for general or special phenomena.
All the significant objections of the Materialist and Necessitarian are contained in the term, Morality, all the objections of the infidel in the term, Religion.
The attempts of the necessitarianto fix upon some standard by which to estimate the antecedent strength of motives have all signally failed.
Driven from this boasted stronghold, the necessitarian resorts to his favorite dialectic strategy.
But such an "alternative" power, the necessitarian affirms, is incomprehensible and inexplicable.
This is the grand argument upon which the necessitarian mainly relies, and it is urged with eloquence and force by Edwards, Chalmers, and McCosh.
He is the only consistent necessitarian who rejects the Christian doctrine of sin, denies all accountability and retribution, and reduces the government of God to mere physical impulsion and the management of a universal mechanism.
The necessitarian will not deny that such self-limitation is essential to the very existence of the kingdom of nature.
But on a closer examination it will be found that when the necessitarian attempts to invalidate our consciousness of alternative power by the application of the causational argument he adroitly shifts his ground.
The necessitarian himself is unable to conceal his conscious embarrassment in presence of these difficulties, and to save his theory he becomes reckless in assertions.
Some modern writers of the necessitarian school, McCosh for example, admit the existence of "self-activity" in the will.
The necessitarian dogma can not be made to quadrate with our primitive convictions; it is out of harmony with all our instinctive beliefs.
There is another way in which the language of the necessitarian deceives.
It either proves all the most absolutenecessitarian could desire, or it proves nothing.
In the ambiguity which fails to distinguish between “the relation of cause and effect,” and the relation which volition bears to its antecedents, “consists the strength of the necessitarian system.
In open defiance of all Calvinistic andnecessitarian philosophy, he even adopts the self-determining power of the will.
The necessitarian contends that “volition, or an act of the mind, is the effect of motive, and that it is subject to the power and action of its cause.
If the sceptic could see what the necessitarian affirms, he might proceed from what he knows, by a direct and irresistible process, to a denial of the foreknowledge of God, in relation to human volitions.
For having identified an act of the will with a state of the sensibility, which is universally conceived to be necessitated, the necessitarian is delivered from more than half his labours.
As we have seen in the last section, the argument of the necessitarian is frequently directed against a false issue; but the point is worthy of a still more careful consideration.
There is another false conception, by which the necessitarian fortifies himself in his opposition to the freedom of the will.
You are in error, says the necessitarian to his opponents, in denying that motive, and in affirming that mind, is the efficient cause of volition.
But fortunately the assumption of the necessitarian is not true.
Edwards is far from being the only necessitarian who has fallen into the error of identifying the sensibility with the will; thus reducing his doctrine to an unassailable truism.
The necessitarian may be an optimist of a high order.
I cannot help adding, that the most consistent necessitarian who have yet appeared, have been those who followed out their principles till they ended in Spinosism,--a doctrine which differs from atheism more in words than in reality.
Collins and Edwards, and the whole race of necessitarian theologians, evidently toil under insurmountable difficulties, while attempting to base religion upon this doctrine, and effect their escape only under a fog of subtleties.
He adopted and advocated the utilitarian and necessitarian theory of morals, and wrote of ordinary theism and religion as arising from personification of unknown causes for general or special phenomena.
It is the latter hypothesis which is expressed by the necessitarian theory.
It is the error committed by the necessitarian who calls the circumstances the cause, in the case of a determination of the will, and neglects the part played by the will itself.
Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at the beginning, the results would have been different.
The necessitarian says, a moment before the volition did not exist, now it does exist; and hence, it necessarily follows, that there must have been a cause by which it was brought into existence.
In other words, that we may freely admit the principle in question, and yet reject the application which the necessitarian is accustomed to make of it.
The necessitarian may see the truth of this maxim clearly, but he applies it vaguely.
In regard to this point, the necessitarian does not seem to have a very clear and definite idea.
And if the doctrine of the necessitarian were true, that volition is a produced effect, we should never infer from it that we have a power of acting at all; we should simply infer that we are susceptible of passive impressions.
It can never be shown that it is involved in the absurdity of an endless series of causes; it will remain for the necessitarian alone to extricate himself from that absurdity.
This immense chasm, the necessitarian can cross only by stepping over from one branch of his ambiguous proposition to another; he either does this, or he does not reach the point in controversy at all.
If I am not greatly mistaken, we may see that the necessitarian has some reason to abate the loftiness of his tone, when he asserts, that "we know that the feelings do exert an influence in the production of volition.
To this the necessitarian replies, what does it signify that a man has a perfect liberty in regard to the choice of "one of two peppercorns?
But in making this attack upon the position of his opponent, when viewed as designed to serve the cause of free-agency, the necessitarian overlooks its bearing upon his own scheme.
Now, one of the fallacies of the argument of the necessitarian is, that it is an attempt to draw a conclusion from the axiomatical truth above referred to, as from the major of a syllogism.
We are now prepared for a distinct statement of the doctrine of Ability, according to the Necessitarian scheme.
The Necessitarian affirms, that no act of Will is possible, only in the direction of the dictates of the Intelligence, or of the strongest impulse of the Sensibility.
I can give no other answer, the Necessitarian replies, than that already given.
Ask the Necessitarian to give the grand argument in favor of his doctrine.
It remains with the Necessitarian to account for the existence of this idea in the human mind, in consistency with his own theory.
I cannot deny, the Necessitarian replies, that you have correctly stated this doctrine.
From this position the Necessitariancannot escape.
This doctrine has never affirmed, that, in the Necessitarian sense, men cannot "do as they please.
The nature of this Ability, according to the Necessitarian scheme, has been stated with equal distinctness in the Christian Spectator.
How can the Necessitarian account for such facts in consistency with his theory?
I may safely appeal to the Necessitarian himself, whether I have not here given an uncaricatured expose of his theory.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "necessitarian" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
