Now, if the will and the affections or sensitivity are one, then, as a mere psychological fact, we must grant that volition is necessary; for nothing can be plainer than that the desires and affections necessarily follow the correlation of the sensitivity and its objects. But if we can distinguish in the consciousness, the will as a personal activity, from the sensitivity,--if we can distinguish volition from the strongest desire or the sense of the most agreeable,--then it will not follow, because the one is necessary, the other is necessary likewise, unless a necessary connexion between the two be also an observed fact of consciousness. This will be inquired into in another part of our undertaking. What we are now mainly concerned with, is Edwards's argument against the conception of a will not necessarily determined. This he calls a contingent determination of will. We adopt the word contingent; it is important in marking a distinction. Edwards, in his argument against a contingent determination, mistakes and begs the question under discussion. 1. He mistakes the question. Contingency is treated of throughout as if identical with chance or no cause. "Any thing is said to be contingent, or to come to pass by chance or accident, in the original meaning of such words, when its connexion with its causes or antecedents, according to the established course of things, is not discerned; and so is what we have no means of foreseeing. And especially is any thing said to be contingent or accidental, with regard to us, when it comes to pass without our foreknowledge, and beside our design and scope. But the word _contingent_ is used abundantly in a very different sense; not for that whose connexion with the series of things we cannot discern so as to foresee the event, but for something which has absolutely no previous ground or reason with which its existence has any fixed and certain connexion." (p. 31.) Thus, according to Edwards, not only is _contingent_ used in the same sense as chance and accident, in the ordinary and familiar acceptation of these words, but it is also gravely employed to represent certain phenomena, as without any ground, or reason, or cause of their existence; and it is under this last point of view that he opposes it as applied to the determination of the will. In part 2, sec. 3, he elaborately discusses the question--"whether any event whatsoever, and volition in particular, can come to pass without a cause of its existence;" and in sec. 4,--"whether volition can arise without a cause, through the activity of the nature of the soul."