That Hume's ignorance was nothing but affectation is proved by his veering completely round immediately afterwards, and in his very next chapter, and almost in his very next page, pronouncing it to be 'universally allowed that matter in all its operations is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause that no other effect in such particular circumstances could possibly have resulted from it.' Throughout the same chapter he argues in the same sense, and quite forgetting how obstinately he had just before contended that there are absolutely no such things as connection or power at all, he defies any one to 'define a cause without comprehending, as part of the definition, _necessary_ connection with its effect.' So highly, indeed, does he now rate that connecting power, whose very existence he had previously so vehemently denied, that he professes himself unable to set any limit to its efficacy. Even for those who should undertake to deduce from it the impossibility of any liberty of human will, and consequently of any human responsibility, pleading that, inasmuch as with a continued chain of necessary causes, reaching from the first great cause of all to every separate volition of every single human creature, it must needs be the Creator of the world who is the ultimate author of all volitions, and consequently solely accountable for every crime which man commits, he affects, with exceedingly ill-sitting sanctimoniousness, to have no better answer than that such belief, being impious, must be absurd and cannot be true. It did not suit his purpose to point out that the volitions of Omnipotence itself, equally with human volitions, are necessary effects of causes--the causes in their case being the other attributes with which Omnipotence is conjoined--and that as it is nevertheless impossible for the volitions of Omnipotence to be otherwise than absolutely free and uncontrolled, so there is no reason why human volitions likewise should not, in spite of the same objection, be as thoroughly free as our own feelings assure us they are.