A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1890)/Chapter 2

by Anthony Collins

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Second argument taken from the impossibility of Liberty.

II. A second reason to prove man a necessary agent is because all his actions have a beginning. For whatever has a beginning must have a cause, and every cause is a necessary cause.

If anything can have a beginning which has no cause, then nothing can produce something. And if nothing can produce something, then the world might have had a beginning without a cause; which is not only an absurdity commonly charged on Atheists, but is a real absurdity in itself.^[1]

Besides, if a cause be not a necessary cause, it is no cause at all. For if causes are not necessary causes, then causes are not suited to, or are indifferent to effects; and the Epicurean System of chance is rendered possible; and this orderly world might have been produced by a disorderly or fortuitous concourse of atoms; or which is all one, by no cause at all. For in arguing against the Epicurean system of chance, do we not say (and that justly) that it is impossible for chance ever to have produced an orderly system of things, as not being a cause suited to the effect; and that an orderly system of things which had a beginning, must have had an intelligent agent for its cause, as being the only proper cause to that effect? All which implies that causes are suited, or have relation to some particular effects, and not to others. And if they be suited to some particular effect and not to others, they can be no causes at all to those others. And therefore a cause not suited to the effect, and no cause, are the same thing. And if a cause not suited to the effect is no cause, then a cause suited to the effect is a necessary cause; for if it does not produce the effect, it is not suited to it, or is no cause at all of it.

Liberty therefore, or a power to act or not to act, to do this is another thing under the same causes, is an impossibility and atheistical.^[2]

And as Liberty stands and can only be grounded on the absurd principle of Epicurean Atheism, so the Epicurean Atheists, who were the most popular and most numerous sect of the Atheists of antiquity, were the great^[3] asserters of Liberty^[4]; as on the other side the Stoics,^[5] who were the most popular and most numerous sect among the religionaries of antiquity, were the great asserters of Fate and Necessity. The case was also the same among the Jews, as among the heathen; the Jews, I say, who besides the light of nature, had many books of Revelation (some whereof are now lost) and who had intimate and personal conversation with God himself. They were principally divided into three sects, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.^[6] The Sadducees, who were esteemed an irreligious and atheistical sect,^[7] maintained the liberty of man. But the Pharisees, who were a religious sect, ascribed all things to fate, or to God’s appointment, and it was the first article of their creed that fate and God do all ^[8]; and consequently they do not assert a true liberty, when they asserted a liberty together with this fatality and necessity of all things. And the Essenes, who were the most religious sect among the Jews, and fell not under the censure of our Savior for their hypocrisy as the Pharisees did, were asserters of absolute fate and necessity. St. Paul,^[9] who was a Pharisee, and the son of a Pharisee, is supposed by the learned Dodwell,^[10] to have received his doctrine of fate from the masters of that sect, as they received it from the Stoics. And he observes further, that the Stoic philosophy is necessary for the explication of Christian theology; that there are examples in the holy scriptures of the Holy Ghost’s speaking according to the opinions of the Stoics, and that in particular the apostle St. Paul in what he has disputed concerning predestination and reprobation, is to be expounded according to the Stoics’ opinion concerning fate. So that Liberty is both the real foundation of popular Atheism, and has been the professed principle of the Atheists themselves; as on the other side, Fate, or the necessity of events, has been esteemed a religious opinion and been the professed principle of the religious, both among heathens and Jews, and also of that great convert to Christianity and great converter of others, St. Paul.^[11]

1. The phrase “commonly charged on Atheists” seems to show that Collins knew better than to charge it upon them himself.—G.W.F.
2. “Atheistical” here is so grotesque that it can only be explained by what I have said in the Preface as to Collins having tried to circumvent his Christian opponents. To every student of philosophy there is an obvious equivoke in the preceding paragraph. The “Epicurean system of chance” simply involved the absence of supernatural determination in the universe, and not the absence of law and order arising from the constitution of things. As the word chance is usually employed, it means nothing but contingency, and contingency is nothing but ignorance. Where we know perfectly all the causes in operation we can predict the result; where we know them but partially we cannot predict with accuracy. For instance, it is certain that any particular man will die, but it is uncertain when he will die, and thus his death is contingent, or, as we say, a matter of chance, although when it happens it will be the necessary effect of the many and subtle causes that operated to produce it.—G.W.F.
3. Lucretius, l. 2, v. 250, etc. Eus. Prep. Ev., l. 6., c. 7.
4. The “Epicurean Atheists”—who were not Atheists in the sense of denying the existence of gods, but only in the sense of denying their interference in the affairs of the cosmos—can hardly be said to have been “assertors of liberty” in Collins’s sense of the word. They did not deny causation, but strenuously affirmed it. Collins probably depended on Cudworth’s Intellectual System of the Universe, a vast magazine of learning which has supplied many subsequent writers with what has passed for original scholarship Now it is remarked by Cudworth (Chap. V., § 1) that Epicurus not only rejected divination and prediction of future events because he denied providence, but “pretended this further reason also against it, because it was a thing absolutely inconsistent with liberty of will, and destructive of the same.” But Diogenes Laertius, from whom Cudworth derived his information, does not represent Epicurus as holding the doctrine of Free Will as it is taught by modern divines, and as it was opposed by Collins. He speaks, like Collins, of the liberty to act as we please, but he does not teach that our choice is capricious and incalculable; and while he denies the tyranny of gods and the necessity of destiny, he also rebukes those who adore Fortune as a deity, although it contributes nothing to the course of events. On the whole, it would seem that Epicurus denied Necessity in the sense of a positive constraint upon our will, and not in the sense of what is called moral causation, which would be inconsistent with his teaching as to the cultivation of good habits.—G.W.F.
5. Cicero de Nat. Deor., l. 1.
6. Josephus Antiq., l. 18, c. 2.
7. With respect to the Sadducees also, I fancy Collins relied upon Cudworth. Our author’s reference to Josephus is erroneous. In the section referred to, the Jewish historian deals only with their belief that death was the end of all. It is in two other places (Antiquities, Bk. xiii, ch. vi, § 9; and Wars, Bk. II., chap. viii., § 14) that he deals with their opinions on fate. He says that the Sadducees utterly rejected fate, that the Essenes absolutely accepted it, and that the Pharisees taught a mixture of fate and free-will. But this “fate” was obviously a divine constraint, and not a natural necessity; for the dispute among these sects was clearly upon whether—to use the very words of Josephus—God is concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil. Collins adds that the Sadducees were esteemed an irreligious and atheistical sects, but this is using language very loosely. They admitted the existence of God and kept the law: yet they were “irreligious” to this extent, that they would have no more religion than was absolutely necessary.—G.W.F.
8. Jud. l. 2, c. 7.
9. Acts xxiii., 6.
10. Proleg. ad Stearn, de Obstin. sect. 40 and 41.
11. This treatment of the Jewish sects shows that Collins was a shrewd polemist. By pressing religion into the service of his argument in this way he was wounding his adversaries in a vital place. The reference to St. Paul is extremely effective, besides proving that Collins had a sly humor. But, at this time of day, it must be said that the Jewish sects were really divided over predestination, and not over the doctrine of moral causation. Between them, as between the Epicureans and Stoics, it was the direction of human affairs by God or the gods that was in dispute, and by no means whether volition was determined by motives. Now that the real question of Free Will versus Determinism is