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.[1]
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[2] asserters of Liberty[3]; as on the other side the
- ↑ “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.
- ↑ Lucretius, l. 2, v. 250, etc. Eus. Prep. Ev., l. 6., c. 7.
- ↑ 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
