Let us then look at this matter, and see if we are really so deplorably blinded by the ambiguity of a word, that we cannot contemplate the glory of the scheme of moral necessity as it is in itself. The distinction between these two things, _natural_ and _moral_ necessity, is certainly a clear and a broad one. Let us see, then, if we may not find our way along the line of this distinction, without that darkness and confusion by which our judgment is supposed to be so sadly misled and perverted. It is on all sides conceded, that natural necessity is inconsistent with the good or ill desert of human actions. If a man were commanded, for example, to leap over a mountain, or to lift the earth from its centre, he would be justly excusable for the non-performance of such things, because they lie beyond the range of his natural power. “There is here a limit to our power,” as Dr. Chalmers says, “beyond which we cannot do that which we please to do; and there are many thousand such limits.”(98) This is natural necessity, in one of its branches. It circumscribes and binds our natural power. It limits the external sphere beyond which the effects or consequences of our volitions cannot be projected. It reaches not to the interior sphere of the will itself, and has no more to do with its freedom than has the influence of the stars. We may please to do a thing, nay, we may freely will it, and yet a natural necessity may cut off and prevent the external consequence of the act. Again, if by a superior force, a man’s limbs or external bodily organs should be used as instruments of good or evil, without his concurrence or consent, he would be excusable for the consequences of such use. This is the other branch of natural necessity. It is evident that it has no relation to the freedom or to the acts of the will, but only to the external movements of the body. It interferes merely with that external freedom of bodily motion, about which we heard so much in the first chapter of this work, and which the advocates of necessity have, for the most part, so industriously laboured to pass off upon the world for the liberty of the will itself. As this natural necessity, then, trenches not upon the interior sphere of the will, so it merely excuses for the performance or non-performance of external actions. It leaves the great question with respect to man’s accountability for the acts of the will itself, from which his external actions proceed, wholly untouched and undetermined.