  The principles of moral reasoning and discourse require effective causation in order to realize agency. In a series of closely related arguments—the Mental Principle Argument, the Moral Principle Argument, and the Memory versus Recall Argument—Crummell begins to describe this relationship. According to his Mental Principle Argument, the god worshipped by a people elevates or debases them since “the abstract principle that the idea of God contains, inherently, such transforming power in a nation, that it makes or unmakes, according as it is clear, and right, and grand; or, on the other hand, is low, and rude, and sensual” (“God and the Nation” [FA], 154). “National greatness” correlates with these ideas, a point he thinks is obvious.  While thought may be the spur to enterprise and organized society, the “generative principle” of the “active power and activity” of mind is the idea of God (155). It is not that God simply determines which actions and events occur, but that the idea of God causes human thought to generate the varied activities of civil society, and so “magnifies a nation's mind” leading to “development in every mode and direction” (158). Being oriented to the future in turn leads individuals to make an enduring nation that can survive them. Crummell is convinced that blacks are well suited to legacy-building because of their “plastic” nature possessing that “native mobility and adaptedness” required to withstand “elements diverse from and stronger than their own”; blacks are patient enough “to wait for the future, in calm abidance and with confident assurance” (“Hope for Africa” [FA], 321). He rejects the counter-argument that individuals are mortal, and since nations are simply aggregates of individuals they are likewise mortal. Over and above such aggregates nations are societies “in an organized state, under the influence and control of broad principles and superior ideas” (“God and the Nation,” 161). Reason's activity is civilizing, leading directly to a further progressive development of that reason.