In conclusion, we shall simply lay down, in a few brief propositions, what we trust has now been seen in relation to the nature of virtue and vice:—1. No necessitated act of the mind can be its virtue or its vice. 2. In order that any act of the will should partake of a moral nature, it must be free from the dominion of causes over which it has no control, or from whose influence it cannot depart. 3. Virtue and vice lie not in the passive state of the sensibility, nor in any other necessitated states of the mind, but in acts of the will, and in habits formed by a repetition of such free voluntary acts. Whatever else may be said in relation to the nature of virtue and of vice, and to the distinction between them, these things appear to be clearly true; and if so, then the scheme of moral necessity is utterly inconsistent with their existence, and saps the very foundation of all moral distinctions. Chapter IV. The Moral World Not Constituted According To The Scheme Of Necessity. I made him just and right; Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Such I created all the ethereal powers And spirits, both them who stood and them who fail’d; Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.—MILTON. We have already witnessed the strange inconsistencies into which the most learned and ingenious men have fallen, in their attempts to reconcile the doctrine of necessity with the accountability of man, and the glory of God. Having involved themselves in that scheme, on what has appeared to them conclusive evidence, they have seemed to struggle in vain to force their way out into the clear and open light of nature. They have seemed to torment themselves, and to confound others, in their gigantic efforts to extricate themselves from a dark labyrinth, out of which there is absolutely no escape. Let us see, then, if we may not refute the pretended demonstration in favour of necessity, and thereby restore the mind to that internal satisfaction which it so earnestly desires, and which it so constantly seeks in a perfect unity and harmony of principle. Section I. The scheme of necessity is based on a false psychology. There are three great leading faculties or attributes of the human mind; namely, the _intelligence_, the _sensibility_, and the _will_. By means of these we _think_, we _feel_, and we _act_. Now, the phenomena of thinking, feeling, and acting, will be found, on examination, to possess different characteristics; of which we must form clear and fixed conceptions, if we would extricate the philosophy of the will from the obscurity and confusion in which it has been so long involved. Let us proceed then to examine them, to interrogate our consciousness in relation to them.