true of volition in particular.(110) And having
reached the position, that volition does not arise out of nothing, but
must "have some antecedent" to introduce it into being; he next proceeds
to prove that there is a necessary connexion between volition and the
antecedents on which it depends for existence. This completes the chain of
logic, and the process is held up by his followers to the admiration of
the world as a perfect demonstration. Let us look at it a little more
closely, and examine the nature and mechanism of its parts.

If the huge frame of the earth, with all its teeming population and
productions, could rise up out of nothing, he argues, and bring itself
into being without any cause of its existence, then we could not prove the
being of a God. All this is very true. For, as he truly alleges, if one
world could thus make itself, so also might another and another, even unto
millions of millions. The universe might make itself, or come into
existence without any cause thereof, and hence we could never know that
there is a God. But surely, if any man imagined that even one world could
create itself, it is scarcely worth while to reason with him. It is not at
all likely that he would be frightened from his position by such a
_reductio ad absurdum_. We should almost as soon suspect a sane man of
denying the existence of God himself, as of doubting the proposition that
"nothing taketh beginning from itself."

Having settled it to his entire satisfaction, by this and other arguments,
that no effect whatever can produce itself, he then proceeds to show that
this proposition is true of volitions as well as of all other events or
occurrences. "If any should imagine," says he, "there is something in the
sort of event that renders it possible to come into existence without a
cause, and should say that the free acts of the will are existences of an
_exceeding different nature_ from other things, by reason of which they
may come into existence without _previous ground or reason of it_, though
other things cannot; if they make this objection in good earnest, it would
be an evidence of their strangely forgetting themselves; for it would be
giving some account of the existence of a thing, when, at the same time,
they would maintain there is no ground of its existence."(111) True, if
any man should suppose that a volition rises up in the world "without any
ground or reason of its existence," and afterward endeavour to assi