For
powers are relations, not agents: and that which has the power or
not the power to operate, is that alone which is or is not free, and
not the power itself For freedom, or not freedom, can belong to
nothing but what has or has not a power to act.
20. Liberty belongs not to the will. The attributing to faculties
that which belonged not to them, has given occasion to this way of
talking: but the introducing into discourses concerning the mind, with
the name of faculties, a notion of their operating, has, I suppose, as
little advanced our knowledge in that part of ourselves, as the
great use and mention of the like invention of faculties, in the
operations of the body, has helped us in the knowledge of physic.
Not that I deny there are faculties, both in the body and mind: they
both of them have their powers of operating, else neither the one
nor the other could operate. For nothing can operate that is not
able to operate; and that is not able to operate that has no power
to operate. Nor do I deny that those words, and the like, are to
have their place in the common use of languages that have made them
current. It looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by: and
philosophy itself, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet, when it
appears in public, must have so much complacency as to be clothed in
the ordinary fashion and language of the country, so far as it can
consist with truth and perspicuity.
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