engaged him in New Machar and King’s College days, the Power or Causality which all changes in the universe presuppose now becomes prominent, alike in his correspondence and in his books. What is meant by Power, and where is the Power centred that is implied in the changes that are always going on, in ourselves and in our surroundings? Priestley’s assumption that matter explains all the phenomena of a human mind; the theory of universal necessity advocated by Kames; and the duties of his Glasgow professorship, all tended to carry his reflections onward from the merely physical to the ethical judgments of the common sense, and so upward from the merely natural to the spiritual interpretation of the universe. 'First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual.'
This runs through his correspondence with Lord Kames. That there is no absolute necessity for men being bad; that their immoral acts are centred and originate in themselves and not in God; that it would be unjust to exact as a duty what it is not in a person’s power to do; that what a man does voluntarily or with deliberate intention, it is also in his power not to do; that what is done without his will is not really done by him at all; and that real power is moral agency,—these are ultimate judgments, reached 'not by logical reasoning,' but in 'the more trustworthy way of immediate perception and feeling,' to which Reid so often appeals. 'If I could suppose God to make a devil a devil, I cannot suppose that He would condemn him for being a devil,' is in a letter to Lord Kames.[1] The impotence of matter rather than its independence is now insisted on; with the inference that at any rate it cannot cause our perceptions, as Priestley supposed.
- ↑ Birkwood mss.
