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the end to claim something, or to concede something which undoes all their work.
(11) The palpable evasions of the necessitarian lead to the same conclusion. Thus Bain explains the action of the school-boy by transferring attention to the teacher, and allowing on his part the introduction of new motives. But this involves liberty. If the boy is in the chain of existing motives, the teacher is also, and the committee also, and the community also, and the generation as well. We can not by going backward find a point of modification. The action of the boy may not be altered, for the motives are not alterable.
(12) If there is liberty, and only if there is liberty, can there be a beginning. Causation knows no beginning, no change of direction, no possibilities. Simple facts without ultimate reasons, inflexible and inexplicable movement, are all that remain to us. If we seem to see reasons in this on-going, something addressed to a rational comprehension, the vision is a mirage of the mind itself. New facts are all that we have. Our vessel sails under bare poles, we know not whither, before an invariable wind. Inquiry is futile, superfluous, a mere accident of the motion itself.
The first five of the reasons now offered spring from the very nature of mind. These are followed by three others which show that the doctrine of necessity can gain no clearness of conception without embracing materialism. Three more arguments spring from the weak way in which the doctrine is centered in itself, and the last argument turns on the relation of liberty to ontology.
