causes in
the fellow's "burglarious" ideas and volitions, with perfect confidence,
and punishes him accordingly. And it is quite clear that such a
proceeding would be grossly unjust, if the links of the logical process
were other than necessarily connected together. The advocate who should
attempt to get the man off on the plea that his client need not
necessarily have had a felonious intent, would hardly waste his time
more, if he tried to prove that the sum of all the angles of a triangle
is not two right angles, but three.

A man's moral responsibility for his acts has, in fact, nothing to do
with the causation of these acts, but depends on the frame of mind which
accompanies them. Common language tells us this, when it uses
"well-disposed" as the equivalent of "good," and "evil-minded" as that
of "wicked." If A does something which puts B in a violent passion, it
is quite possible to admit that B's passion is the necessary consequence
of A's act, and yet to believe that B's fury is morally wrong, or that
he ought to control it. In fact, a calm bystander would reason with both
on the assumption of moral necessity. He would say to A, "You were wrong
in doing a thing which you knew (that is, of the necessity of which you
were convinced) would irritate B." And he would say to B, "You are wrong
to give way to passion, for you know its evil effects"--that is the
necessary connection between yielding to passion and evil.

So far, therefore, from necessity destroying moral responsibility, it is
the foundation of all praise and blame; and moral admiration reaches its
climax in the ascription of necessary goodness to the Deity.

To the statement of another consequence of the necessarian doctrine,
that, if there be a God, he must be the cause of all evil as well as of
all good, Hume gives no real reply--probably because none is possible.
But then, if this conclusion is distinctly and unquestionably deducible
from the doctrine of necessity, it is no less unquestionably a direct
consequence of every known form of monotheism. If God is the cause of
all things, he must be the cause of evil among the rest; if he is
omniscient, he must have the fore-knowledge of evil; if he is almighty,
he must possess the power of preventing, or of extinguishing evil. And
to say that an all-knowing and all-powerful being is not responsible for
what happens, because he only permits it, is, under its intellectual
aspect, a piece of childish sophis