It has been a misfortune to this question, that it has seldom been treated by persons who knew any thing of the organization or physiology of the human frame; and that it has been complicated with all the prejudice arising from the theological tenets of those who opposed the doctrine of necessity. Every physician knows, though metaphysicians know little about it, that the laws which govern the animal machine, are as certain and invariable as those which guide the planetary system, and are as little within the controul of the human being who is subject to them. Every sensation therefore, and every idea dependent on, or resulting from the state of the sensory, is the necessary effect of the laws of organization by which that state was produced. But we neither have nor can have any sensation or any idea, but what is so dependent, or but what thus results; for we can neither feel nor think without the brain. The words we use for the Phenomena termed mental, are mere terms of classification and arrangement of the sensations and ideas thus produced, and their combinations. Hence it follows, that all these phenomena depend on the laws which regulate the animal system, and are the necessary, inevitable result of those laws. The obscurity which has enveloped this question, has arisen from want of due attention to that state of mind (or rather of body) which we call, the will; and from the power that animals seem to have over the voluntary muscles. But every Physiologist knows that the state of the system which calls into action the voluntary muscles, that is, a state of want, desire or inclination, whether to act or to abstain, is the result of previous circumstances to which the animal is exposed; and the action of the voluntary muscles, is equally the result of necessary laws, as those of the involuntary. The great object of terror to the Divines in this question about Necessity, was the consequence resulting, that God is the author of Sin. Many and subtile were the distinctions made upon this subject by the necessarian theologists among the schoolmen, and down to the middle of the seventeenth century. Richard Baxter the peace-maker, in his Christian Directory, his Catholic Theologie and some other works, has briefly reviewed them all, and as usual distinguished upon them so acutely, that what was not quite clear before, he has most effectually obscured. The prevailing opinion, however, seems to have been, not that God permitted the sinful act (for the reply was unanswerable, that God must be considered, as willing that which he does not prevent when he can,) but that God, in the common course of nature as pre-ordained by him, permitted the action itself to come to pass, but not the intention or quo animo of the actor, in which the sin consists; or as Gale expresses it in the quaint language of the time, it is “God’s pre-determinate concurse to the entitative act.”