“By whatever name we call the act of the will,” says Edwards, “choosing, refusing, approving, disapproving, liking, disliking, embracing, rejecting, determining, directing, commanding, forbidding, inclining or being averse, being pleased or displeased with—all may be reduced to this of choosing.”(104) Thus, in the vocabulary and according to the psychology of this great author, the phenomena of the sensibility and those of the will are identified, as well as the faculties themselves. _Pleasing_ and _willing_, liking and acting, are all one with him. His psychology admits of no distinction, for example, between the pleasant impression made by an apple on the sensibility, and the act of the will by which the hand is put forth to take it. “The will and the affections of the soul,” says he, “are not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the will, nor do they differ from the mere actings of the will and inclination, but only in the liveliness and sensibility of exercise.”(105) And again, “I humbly conceive that the affections of the soul are not properly distinguished from the will, as though there were two faculties.”(106) And still more explicitly, “all acts of the will are truly acts of the affections.”(107) Is it not strange, that one who could exhibit such wonderful discrimination when the exigences of his system demanded the exercise of such a power, should have confounded things so clearly distinct in their natures as an act of the will and an agreeable impression made on the sensibility? It is not possible for any mind, no matter how great its powers, to see the nature of things clearly when it comes to the contemplation of them with such a confusion of ideas. Even President Edwards is not exempt from the common lot of humanity. His doctrine is necessarily enveloped in obscurity. We can turn it in no light without being struck with its inconsistencies or its futility. He repeatedly says, the will is always determined by the strongest affection, or appetite, or passion; that is, by the most agreeable state of the sensibility. But if the will and the sensibility are identical, as his language expressly makes them; or if the states of the one are not distinguishable from the states of the other, then to say that the will is always determined by the sensibility, or an act of the will by the strongest affection of the sensibility, is to say that a thing is determined by itself. It is to say, in fact, that the will is always determined by itself; a doctrine against which he uniformly protests. Nay, more, that an act of the will causes itself; a position which he has repeatedly ascribed to his opponents, and held up to the derision of mankind.