The maxim in question is applied to volition; every change in nature, even the voluntary acts of the mind, must have a cause. Now according to Edwards' explanation of the term, this is a proposition which, I will venture to say, no man in his right mind ever ventured to deny. It is true, that President Edwards tells us of those, who "imagine that a volition has no cause, or _that it produces itself_;" and he has very well compared this to the absurdity of supposing, "that I gave myself my own being, or that I came into being without a cause," p. 277. But who ever held such a doctrine? Did any man, in his right mind, ever contend that "a volition could produce itself," can arise out of nothing, and bring itself into existence? If so, they were certainly beyond the reach of logic; they stood in need of the physician. I have never been so unfortunate as to meet with any advocate of free-agency, either in actual life or in history, who supposed that a volition arose out of nothing, without _any cause_ of its existence, or that it produced itself. They have all maintained, with one consent, that the mind is the cause of volition. Is the mind nothing? If a man should say, as so many have said, that the mind produces its own volitions, is that equivalent to saying, that nothing produces it; that it comes "into being accidentally, without any cause of its being?" Such is the broad caricature of their doctrine, which is repeatedly given by President Edwards. It is freely admitted, and the advocates of free-agency have always admitted, that volition has a cause, as that word is frequently used by Edwards. He tells us, that by cause he sometimes means any antecedent, whether it exerts any positive influence or no. Now, in this sense, it is conceded by the advocates of free-agency, that motive itself is the cause of volition. This is the question: Is motive the efficient, or producing cause of volition? This is the question, I say; but Edwards frequently loses sight of it in a mist of ambiguities; and he lays around him in the dark, with such prodigious strength, that if his adversaries were not altogether imaginary beings, and therefore impassible to his ponderous blows, I have no doubt he would have slain more of them than ever Samson did of the Philistines.