Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY TO RESPONSIBILITY, PRAISE AND BLAME, REWARD AND PUNISHMENT, VIRTUE AND VICE. So clear is the evidence in favour of Philosophical Necessity that it would never for one moment have been doubted if it had not been for its supposed consequences. It was supposed to lead to fatalism—to the doctrine of non-responsibility, and consequently to be subversive of the very foundations of morality. We should never attempt, however, to stifle truth from its supposed consequences, but either make it harmonise with other truth or quietly wait till we can. If we had followed this course in this direction we should earlier have discovered that Induction applies to Mind as well as to Matter—and that as the great desideratum in Nature is Unity, Law, and Order, we should not have left it out of one-half creation, and that the most important, and having banished Miracle and the Supernatural from the physical world, we should not have left it in the world of mind and morals. We should have been able to banish half the misery of life that arises from the supposition that things might have been otherwise, that they ought to have been otherwise, and at thesame time we should have banished the source of at least one half of the crime in the world, that arising from the feeling of revenge and the desire of what is called retributive justice, and the origin and use of what is called " evil," would have been made much clearer. We shall now proceed to trace the doctrine to its legitimate consequence's. Responsibility.—If a man's actions are determined necessarily by the previous state of his mind, and the circumstances or influences to which he is exposed, and if, consequently, no action of his life could possibly have been different from what it ac...