successful. As a general argument his account of
the determination of the will is defective, notably in his abstract
conception of the will and in his inadequate, but suggestive,
treatment of causation, in regard to which he anticipates in important
respects the doctrine of Hume. Instead of making the motive to choice
a factor within the concrete process of volition, he regards it as a
cause antecedent to the exercise of a special mental faculty. Yet his
conception of this faculty as functioning only in and through motive
and character, inclination and desire, certainly carries us a long way
beyond the abstraction in which his opponents stuck, that of a bare
faculty without any assignable content. Modern psychology has
strengthened the contention for a fixed connexion between motive and
act by reference to subconscious and unconscious processes of which
Edwards, who thought that nothing could affect the mind which was
unperceived, little dreamed; at the same time, at least in some of its
developments, especially in its freer use of genetic and organic
conceptions, it has rendered much in the older forms of statement
obsolete, and has given a new meaning to the idea of
self-determination, which, as applied to an abstract power, Edwards
rightly rejected as absurd.

Edwards's controversy with the Arminians was continued in the essay on
_Original Sin_, which was in the press at the time of his death. He
here breaks with Augustine and the Westminster Confession by arguing,
consistently with his theory of the Will, that Adam had no more
freedom of will than we have, but had a special endowment, a
supernatural gift of grace, which by rebellion against God was lost,
and that this gift was withdrawn from his descendants, not because of
any fictitious imputation of guilt, but because of their real
participation in his guilt by actual identity with him in his
transgression.

The _Dissertation on the Nature of True Virtue_, posthumously
published, is justly regarded as one of the most original works on
ethics of the 18th century, and is the more remarkable as reproducing,
with no essential modification, ideas on the subject written in the
author's youth in the notes on the Mind. Virtue is conceived as the
beauty of moral qualities. Now beauty, in Edwards's view, always
consists in a harmonious relation in the elements involved, an
agreement of being with be