the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct”’ (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and ‘depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment’ (i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced as ‘the most odious of all monopolies’ (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman ‘the same preference that I do.’ ‘This,’ says he, ‘will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.’ It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but ‘Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity’ (i. 102). As to Godwin’s necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. ‘Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced’ (i. 297). ‘A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity’ (i. 308). ‘A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the candlestick is magnetism’ (i. 309).