Having completed our analysis, in as far as our present purpose demands, we may proceed to show that the system of necessity is founded on a false psychology,—on a dark confusion of the facts of human nature. It is very remarkable that all the advocates of this system, from Hobbes down to Edwards, will allow the human mind to possess only two faculties, the understanding and the will. The will and the sensibility are expressly identified by them. Locke distinguished between will and desire, between the _faculty_ of willing and the _susceptibility_ to feeling; but Edwards has endeavoured to show that there is no such distinction as that for which Locke contends. We shall not arrest the progress of our remarks in order to point out the manner in which Edwards has deceived himself by an appeal to logic rather than to consciousness, because the threefold distinction for which we contend is now admitted by necessitarians themselves. Indeed, after the clear and beautiful analysis by M. Cousin, they could not well do otherwise than recognise this threefold distinction; but they have done so, we think it will be found, without perceiving all the consequences of such an admission to their system. It is an admission which, in our opinion, will show the scheme of necessity to be insecure in its foundation, and disjointed in all its parts. With the light of this distinction in our minds, it will be easy to follow and expose the sophistries of the necessitarian. He often declaims against the idea of liberty for which we contend, on the ground that it would be, not a perfection, but a very great imperfection of our nature to possess such a freedom. But in every such instance he confounds the will with one of the passive susceptibilities of the mind. Thus, for example, Collins argues that liberty would be a great imperfection, because “nothing can be more irrational and absurd than to be able to refuse our assent to what is evidently true to us, and to assent to what we see to be false.” Now, all this is true, but it is not to the purpose; for no one contends that the intelligence is free in assenting to, or in dissenting from, the evidence in view of the mind. No rational being, we admit, could desire such a freedom; could desire to be free, for example, from the conviction that two and two make four. M. Lamartine, we are aware, expresses a very lively abhorrence of the mathematics, because they allow not a sufficient _freedom of thought_—because they exercise so great a _despotism over the intellect_. But the circumstance which this flowery poet deems an imperfection in the mathematics, every enlightened friend of free-agency will regard as their chief excellency and glory.