The younger Edwards asserts, that “to say that an agent that is acted upon cannot act, is as groundless as to say that a body acted upon cannot move.” Again: “My actions are _mine_; but in what sense can they be properly called mine, if I be not the efficient cause of them?—Answer: my thoughts and all my perceptions and feelings are _mine_; yet it will not be pretended that I am the efficient cause of them.”(132) But in regard to all our thoughts and feelings, we are, as we have seen, altogether passive; and these are ours, because they are necessarily produced _in us_. Is it only in this sense that our acts are ours? Are they ours only because they are necessarily caused to exist in our minds? If so, then indeed we understand these writers; but if they are not merely passive impressions, why resort to states of the intelligence and the sensibility, which are conceded to be passive, in order to illustrate the reasonableness of their scheme, and to expose the unreasonableness of the opposite doctrine? We admit that every passive impression is caused; but the question is, Can the mind be caused to act? As we lay all the stress on the _nature of an act_, as seen in the light of consciousness, what does it signify to tell us that another thing, which possesses no such nature, may be efficiently caused? All such illustrations overlook the essential difference between action and passion, between _doing_ and _suffering_. Section VI. The scheme of necessity is rendered plausible by a false phraseology.