内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: positive and negative, upon which the consequent invariably follows without further condition." For moral causation let us revert to our example of a man being tempted to strike a bargain, advantageous but unjust. Suppose he yields. Let us sift out and distinguish cause and condition in that free act. The cause of the volition is the man himself. He, and no other thing besides, causes the volition, full and free. But he is not the cause of the initial complacency, or the original impulse to do wrong. That complacency resulted in him necessarily and inevitably from the news which he heard, supervening upon his previous habits of mind. But, upon reflection, the object of this complacency proves to be not all that he could wish. The mere moral turpitude of the thing is a volitional drawback. This inadequacy of the object to his thinking mind leaves him free: he may either sustain the complacency into which he finds himself spontaneously thrown, and so sustaining it pour himself out and identify himself with the object, or he may let it pass. If he so sustains his spontaneous complacency, he freely wills, and that under the following conditions, remote and proximate. The proximate condition is the impulsive complacency which, like the wash of a steamer, went along with the idea of the bargain, when that idea, uninvited, entered his mind. The facts reported to him, and his antecedent views of a good bargain, were the remote conditions giving rise to the complacency. But his open- eyed acceptance of the complacency without thorough contentment in the same,?in other words, the free act of his will,?is chargeable on himself alone. He caused it, he did it, he is answerable for it,?he, and not his circumstances. "The will itself, and each propension of a man during his deliberation...