Driven from this boasted stronghold, the necessitarian resorts to his favorite dialectic strategy. He demands the explanation of equipotent causation, how one cause can be adequate to several effects. He asks, _What causes the will to put forth one particular volition rather than another?_ Now when we have shown that, as a fact of consciousness and experience, a personal, _spiritual_ cause is adequate to several results, we are entitled in reason and justice to protest against any attempt to push the inquiry a step farther. We have attained an ultimate fact, and we have no right to cast doubt upon its authority by raising perplexing questions as to the _how_ or _why_ of that which _is_. This is precisely the method by which the atheist Holyoake would invalidate the argument for the existence of the infinite First Cause. He subjects the Deity to this universal law of causality, and asks, What caused the Creator to create? "The atheist holds that the universe is an endless series of causes and effects _ad infinitum_, and therefore the idea of a _first_ cause is an absurdity and a contradiction." The "infinite series" of Edwards and of Holyoake are constructed on the same principle. They both ask _a_ cause for _the_ cause. When, therefore, it is asked, What causes the will to effect one volition rather than another? our answer is, _Nothing whatever!_ "Of its own effect, WILL, in its proper conditions, is not a partial, but a full and adequate cause. Put your finger upon any effect (volition) and ask, What caused this result exclusively of the others? and the reply is, The will, or the agent in willing. Ask then what caused the will in its conditions to cause the volition, and the reply is, NOTHING. Nay, you are a bad philosopher in asking; for for its own effect will or the willing agent is a complete cause: as complete a cause as any cause whatever; _and every complete cause produces its effect_ UNCAUSEDLY. The volition, like every other effect, is completely accounted for when a complete cause is assigned. To ask what caused the complete cause to produce the effect is to ask the cause of causation."[534]