ll see, the very greatest ingenuity
to keep from perceiving it. Hence, in our humble opinion, the praise which
has been lavished on the logic of Spinoza is not deserved.

His superior consistency only shows one of two things--either that he
possessed a stronger reasoning faculty than his great master, Descartes,
or a weaker moral sense. In our opinion, it shows the latter. If his moral
sentiments had been vigorous and active, they would have induced him, no
doubt, either to invent sophistical evasions of such an inference, or to
reject the doctrine from which it flows. If a Descartes, a Leibnitz, or an
Edwards, for example, had seen the consequences of the scheme of necessity
as clearly as they were seen by Spinoza, his moral nature would have
recoiled from it with such force as to dash the premises to atoms. If any
praise, then, be due to Spinoza for such triumphs of the reasoning power,
it should be given, not to the superiority of his logic, but to the apathy
of his moral sentiments. For our part, greatly as we admire sound
reasoning and consistency in speculation, we had rather be guilty of ten
thousand acts of logical inconsistency, such as those of Edwards, or
Leibnitz, or Descartes, than to be capable of resting in the conclusion to
which the logic of Spinoza conducted him--that every moral distinction is a
vulgar prejudice, and that the existence of moral goodness is a dream.(87)

Section II.

The attempt of Edwards to reconcile the scheme of necessity with the
reality of moral distinctions.

It would not be difficult to see, perhaps, that a necessary holiness, or a
necessary sin, is a contradiction in terms, if we would only allow reason
to speak for itself, instead of extorting testimony from it by subjecting
it to the torture of a false logic. For what proposition can more clearly
carry its own evidence along with it, than that whatever is necessary to
us, that whatever we cannot possibly avoid, is neither our virtue nor our
fault? What can be more unquestionable, than that we can be neither to
praise nor to blame, neither justly rewardable nor punishable for anything
over whose existence we have no power or control? Yet this question,
apparently so plain and simple in itself, has been enveloped in clouds of
metaphysical subtilty, and obscured by huge masses of scholastic jargon.
If, on this subject, we have wandered in the dim twilight of uncertain
speculation, instea