The truth is, we must reason about cause and effect as they appear to us; and whether time be an illusion or not, we must, in all our reasonings, conceive of cause and effect as conjoined in what we call time, or we cannot reason at all. According to the younger Edwards, the act of creation, not the mere purpose to create, but the real causative act of creation, existed in the divine mind from all eternity. Why then did the world spring up and come into existence at one point of time rather than another? How happened it, that so many ages rolled away, and this mighty causative act produced no effect? In view of such a case, how could the author have said, as he frequently does, that a cause necessarily implies its effect? How can this be, if a causative act of the Almighty may exist, and yet, for millions of ages, its omnipotent energy produce no effect? Indeed, such a doctrine destroys all our notions of cause and effect; it overthrows "the great principle of common sense" that cause and effect necessarily imply each other; and involves all our reasoning from cause to effect, and _vice versa_, in the utmost perplexity and confusion. It throws clouds and darkness over the whole field of inquiry. Since the time of Dr. Samuel Clarke, it has been frequently objected to the scheme of moral necessity, that it is involved in the great absurdity of an infinite series of causes. President Edwards urged this objection against the doctrine of the self-determining power; he did not perceive that it lay against his own scheme of the motive-determining power; and hence, he has not even attempted to answer it. This was reserved for the younger Edwards; and although he has deservedly ranked high as a logician, I cannot but regard his attempt to answer the objection in question, as one of the most remarkable abortions in the history of philosophy. SECTION VI. OF THE MAXIM THAT EVERY EFFECT MUST HAVE A CAUSE. IN a former section, I referred to some of the false assumptions which have been incautiously conceded to the necessitarian, and in which he has laid the foundations of his system; but I have not, as yet, alluded to the argument or deduction in which he is accustomed to triumph. This argument, strange as it may seem, is a deduction, not from any principle or general fact which has been ascertained by observation or experience, but from a self-evident and universal truth.