“If we should suppose non-entity to be about to bring forth,” he continues, “and things were coming into existence without any cause or _antecedent_ on which the existence, or kind or manner of existence depends, or which could at all determine whether the things should be stones or stems, or beasts or angels, or human bodies or souls, or only some new motion or figure in natural bodies, or some new sensation in animals, or new idea in the human understanding, or new volition in the will, or anything else of all the infinite number of possibles,—then it certainly would not be expected, although many millions of millions of things were coming into existence in this manner all over the face of the earth, that they should all be only of one particular kind, and that it should be thus in all ages, and that this sort of existences should never fail to come to pass when there is room for them, or a subject capable of them, and that constantly whenever there is occasion.”(115) Now all these words are put together to prove that non-entity cannot bring forth effects, at least such effects as we see in the world; for if non-entity brought them forth, that is, to come to the point in dispute, if non-entity brought forth our volitions, they would not be always of one particular sort of effects. But they are of one particular sort, and hence there must be some antecedent to account for this uniformity in their nature, and they could not have been brought forth by nonentity! Surely if anything can equal the fatuity of the hypothesis that nonentity can bring forth, or that a thing can produce itself, it is a serious attempt to refute it. How often, while poring over the works of necessitarians, are we lost in amazement at the logical mania which seems to have seized them, and which, in its impetuous efforts to settle and determine everything by reasoning, leaves reason itself neither time nor opportunity to contemplate the nature of things themselves, or listen to its own most authoritative and irreversible mandates.