This reasoning, and all that follows in the attempt to meet various evasions, as Edwards terms them, of the advocates of a self-determining will, depend mainly upon the assumption, that if the will determines itself, it must determine itself by an act of choice; that is, inasmuch as those acts of the will, or of the soul, considered in its power of willing, or in its personal activity, by which effects are produced out of the activity or will itself, are produced by acts of choice, for example, walking and talking, rising up and sitting down: therefore, if the soul, in the power of willing, cause volitions, it must cause them by volitions. The causative act by which the soul causes volitions, must itself be a volition. This assumption Edwards does not even attempt to sustain, but takes for granted that it is of unquestionable validity. If the assumption be of unquestionable validity, then his position is impregnable; for nothing can be more palpably absurd than the will determining volitions by volitions, in an interminable series. Before directly meeting the assumption, I remark, that if it be valid, it is fatal to all causality. Will is simply cause; volition is effect. I affirm that the will is the sole and adequate cause of volition. Edwards replies: if will is the cause of volition, then, to cause it, it must put forth a causative act; but the only act of will is volition itself: hence if it cause its own volitions, it must cause them by volitions. Now take any other cause: there must be some effect which according to the general views of men stands directly connected with it as its effect. The effect is called the phenomenon, or that by which the cause manifests itself. But how does the cause produce the phenomenon? By a causative act:--but this causative act, according to Edwards's reasoning, must itself be an effect or phenomenon. Then this effect comes between the cause, and what was at first considered the immediate effect but the effect in question must likewise be caused by a causative act; and this causative act, again, being an effect, must have another causative act before it; and so on, _ad infinitum_. We have here then an infinite series of causative acts--an absurdity of the same kind, with an infinite series of volitions.