The doctrine of causation, under consideration, annihilates one of the clearest and most fundamental distinctions ever made in philosophy; the distinction between _action_ and _passion_, between _mind_ and _matter_. Matter is passive, mind is active. The very first law of motion laid down in the Principia, a work so much admired by M. Comte and Mr. Mill, is based on the idea that matter is wholly inert, and destitute of power either to move itself, or to check itself when moved by anything _ab extra_. This will not be denied. But is mind equally passive? Is there nothing in existence which rises above this passivity of the material world? If there is not, and such is the evident conclusion of the doctrine in question, then all things flow on in one boundless ocean of passivity, while there is no First Mover, no Self-active Agent in the universe. Indeed, Mr. Mill has expressly declared, that the distinction between agent and patient is illusory.(51) If this be true, we are persuaded that M. Comte has been more successful in delivering the world from the being of a God, than Mr. Mill has been in relieving it from the difficulties attending the scheme of necessity. Section VIII. The views of Kant and Sir William Hamilton in relation to the antagonism between liberty and necessity. “To clear up this seeming antagonism between the mechanism of nature and freedom in one and the self-same given action, we must refer,” says Kant, “to what was advanced in the critique of pure reason, or what, at least, is a corollary from it, viz., that the necessity of nature which may not consort with the freedom of the subject, attaches simply to a thing standing under the relations of time, i. e., to the modifications of the acting subject as phenomena, and that, therefore, so far (i. e., as phenomena) the determinators of each act lie in the foregoing elapsed time, and are quite beyond his power, (part of which are the actions man has already performed, and the phenomenal character he has given himself in his own eyes,) yet, _e contra_, the self-same subject, being self-conscious of itself as a thing in itself, considers its existence as somewhat detached from the conditions of time, and itself, so far forth, as only determinable by laws given it by its own reason.”(52)