Sufficiency

“ It always [73] seeks to fix a gulf between us and the Infinite Sufficiency. It would always have us believe that that sufficiency is not our own, but that by an act of uncertain favour we may have occasional spoonfuls of it doled out to us. Christ's teaching is different. We do not need to come with our pitcher to the well to draw water, like the woman of Samaria, but we have in ourselves an inexhaustible supply of the living water springing up into everlasting life. ”

“ And yet we are become worse than the wild beasts.” [94]
Again he protests:—
“Neither am I leading you to the lofty peak of total renunciation of possessions [ἀκτημοσύνη] ; but for the present I require you to cut off superfluities, and to desire a sufficiency alone. Now, the boundary of sufficiency is the using those things which it is impossible to live without. No one debars you from these, nor forbids you your daily food. I say ‘food,’ not ‘luxury’ [τροφὴν οὐ τρυφὴν λέγω] —‘raiment,’ not ‘ornament.’ Rather, this frugality—to speak correctly—is, in the best sense, luxury. ”

“ The latter will be cleared by the omission of the preposition 'to:' 'then no more remains [to be said] , but that your sufficiency, as your worth is able, and let them work.' This change, however, will only partially cure the defective measure; and even were we to omit 'that,' as well as 'to,' the line would not be perfect without reducing 'sufficiency' to a trisyllable. It has been thought best, therefore, to leave the text as it stands in the first folio. 'Sufficiency' is adequate authority. ”

“ The same result [14] is seen to follow also from the notion of self-sufficiency, a quality thought to belong to the final good. Now by sufficient for Self, we mean not for a single individual living a solitary life, but for his parents also and children and wife, and, in general, friends and countrymen; for man is by nature adapted to a social existence. ”

“ Sufficient wealth is produced in this country to-day which would, under a well-ordered state of society, enable every man, woman, and child to have a sufficiency [66] of all things essential to a healthy human life. ”

“ Men consistently trained to an unremitting discrimination of honor, worth, and personal force in their daily conduct, and to whom these criteria afford the definitive ground of sufficiency in coördinating facts for the purposes of life, will not be satisfied to fall short of the like definitive ground of sufficiency when they come to coördinate facts for the purposes of knowledge simply. ”

“ It is suitable, therefore, for women who serve Christ to adopt simplicity. For in reality simplicity provides for sanctity, by reducing redundancies to equality, and by furnishing from whatever is at hand the enjoyment sought from superfluities. For simplicity, as the name shows, is not conspicuous, is not inflated [272] or puffed up in aught, but is altogether even, and gentle, and equal, and free of excess, and so is sufficient. And sufficiency is a condition which reaches its proper end without excess or defect. ”

“ In the previous Lecture the notion or conception of absolute necessity was explained—of absolute necessity, I repeat. Very often absolute means nothing more than abstract, and very frequently, too, it is imagined that when the word absolute is used everything is said that is necessary, and that no further definition can or ought to be given. As a matter of fact it is just with this definition that we are chiefly concerned. Absolute necessity is abstract, the abstract pure and simple, inasmuch as it depends on itself and does not subsist in or from or through an Other. ”

“ Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another's life to save his own. ”

“ Why should the necessary being exclude the possibility of other beings? Is it not more reasonable to conclude that it contains the reason of their possibility and existence? The being which has in itself the necessity of existing, must possess activity, and the external term of this activity is production. Why may not other beings be the result of this production? ”

“ The concept of necessity has its validity in such a movement of judgment as has been described. "Necessity, as the middle term, is the mid-wife which, from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the unified judgment just coming into life—it being understood that the separateness of the original judgments is not as yet quite negated, nor the unity of the coming judgment quite attained." [72] The judgment of necessity connects itself with certain facts in the situation which are immediately concerned with our practical activities. ”

“ Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. ”

“ The more we examine the necessity of the connection of the conditions, one with another, the stronger this difficulty becomes; for if it be said that one condition cannot exist without another; with still more reason we ask why a first condition is not necessary for the collection of the conditions, or the entire series. ”

“ Now the truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless—power, for example—is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. ”

“ The affirmative opinion is commonly called the doctrine of Necessity, as asserting human volitions and actions to be necessary and inevitable. The negative maintains that the will is not determined, like other phenomena, by antecedents, but determines itself; that our volitions are not, properly speaking, the effects of causes, or at least have no causes which they uniformly and implicitly obey. ”

“ Here necessity constitutes the abstract force which is above all the particular spiritual, moral, and natural forces. These latter, however, partly possess the character of non-spiritual, merely natural force, which remains completely under the power of necessity, while their personalities are merely personifications; and yet, although they may not exactly deserve to be called persons, they also partly contain the higher characteristic of subjective inherent freedom. ”

“ What is this universality, and where is its limit? It is this: that all individuals, without an exception, have a special moral destination of their own; and whatever this destination is for every particular individual, lies beyond the limit. ”

“ Do Necessitarians hold the doctrine of Necessity as defined in this chapter? Do they really hold, in respect to every act of will, that, in the circumstances of its occurrence, that one act only is possible, and that cannot but arise? ”

“ In order to arrive at a correct decision on the first part of this question, it is necessary to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good; and, in order to decide upon the relative degrees of value of different things, we must similarly consider what comparative value seems to attach to the isolated existence of each. ”

“ In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very centre of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law. ”

“ Did you ever consider how uncertain a quantity is opportunity, as inscrutable as the ways of Providence? In all ages and in all callings it has been one of the numerous mysteries that make life so attractive. ”

“ As has been just pointed out, if we are to maintain that whatever is willed in a certain way is also good, we must in the first place be able to shew that certain things have one property ‘goodness,’ and that the same things also have the other property that they are willed in a certain way. ”

“ But this sense of dependency, which results from experience and reasoning on the facts, which every day cannot fail to produce, has uniformly established the knowledge of our dependence to every individual of the species who are rational, which necessarily involves, or contains in it, the idea of a ruling power, or that there is a God, which ideas are synonymous. ”

“ If it be true that there are, as part of the universal human experience, however overlaid and stifled, these necessities of which I have been speaking, the very existence of the necessities affords a presumption, before all evidence, that, somehow and somewhere, they shall be supplied. ”

“ If he should be for compounding the matter, and adopting his own principle in part, and the principle of utility in part, let him say how far he will adopt it? When he has settled with himself where he will stop, then let him ask himself how he justifies to himself the adopting it so far? ”

“ He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity, means that, contemplating the events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects, no one of which could occupy any other place than it does occupy, or act in any other place than it does act. ”

“ We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside."
But nevertheless it becomes a necessity for us to understand the wishes of those who demand a change of condition, and it is necessary that they should understand the compensations as well as the limitations of every condition. ”

“ I mean that the good which is allotted a coordination among forms that are the sources of perfection, should be subordinate to essence, which ranks among causes, whence subsistence originates, if the good is being, and a certain being. ”

“ And from hence it may be understood, that the proportions of excess and defect are quantity, being capable of more and less; but the proportion of equality is not quantity, because not capable neither of more, nor of less. ”

“ The double use, in the free-will controversy, of the word Necessity, which sometimes stands only for Certainty, at other times for Compulsion; sometimes for what can not be prevented, at other times only for what we have reason to be assured will not ”

“ Why rob one to feed the other?
“If you adopt, as absolute, a standard of evenness which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely even. If you adopt, as absolute, a criterion of right which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely right. ”

“ Still it must be observed that the collection of created beings, whatever be their perfection, are necessarily subject to the condition of dependence on another being; a condition from which the infinite being above is essentially exempt. ”

“ He that made all, and maintains all, cannot be benefited by any of our services, nor needs them. If we receive and derive all from him, he is all-sufficient, and therefore cannot but be self-sufficient, and independent. ”

“ By this illustration, then, we obtain a rule to determine what one ought to take from him who has the greater, and what to add to him who has the less. The excess of the mean over the less must be added to the less, and the excess of the greater over the mean be taken from the greater. ”

“ But the degree of perfection to which any power or individual is to be developed is determined, morally, by the principle of equilibrium. Moreover, we may recognize degrees of perfection in individuals who are, nevertheless, not to be classified as of less or greater moral value. ”

“ These anomalies cannot be accounted for on any rational principle; but may perhaps be attributed to the absence of that requisite qualification, which sometimes serves a man in lieu of birth or fortune, and not unfrequently goes further than both these advantages;—it is that most enviable requisite, known under the appropriate, though somewhat vulgar, denomination of good-luck. ”

“ It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as if, even with an unchanging object, we might make more or less, as we choose. If it be really indeterminate, our future acts are ambiguous or unpredestinate: in common parlance, our wills are free. ”

“ This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom: and the truth of substance is the Notion,—an independence which, though self-repulsive into distinct independent elements, yet in that repulsion is self-identical, and in the movement of reciprocity still at home and conversant only with itself.
Necessity is often called hard, and rightly so, if we keep only to necessity as such, i.e. ”

“ Now we have often said already that essence is one thing and subsistence another, and that essence signifies the common and general form [2] of subsistences of the same kind, such as God, man, while subsistence marks the individual, that is to say, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, or Peter, Paul. ”

“ The link of necessity quâ necessity is identity, as still inward and concealed, because it is the identity of what are esteemed actual things, although their very self-subsistence is bound to be necessity. ”