For,
to ask whether a man be at liberty to will either motion or rest,
speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can
will what he wills, or be pleased with what he is pleased with? A
question which, I think, needs no answer: and they who can make a
question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another,
and another to determine that, and so on in infinitum.
26. The ideas of liberty and volition must be defined. To avoid
these and the like absurdities, nothing can be of greater use than
to establish in our minds determined ideas of the things under
consideration. If the ideas of liberty and volition were well fixed in
our understandings, and carried along with us in our minds, as they
ought, through all the questions that are raised about them, I suppose
a great part of the difficulties that perplex men's thoughts, and
entangle their understandings, would be much easier resolved; and we
should perceive where the confused signification of terms, or where
the nature of the thing caused the obscurity.
27. Freedom. First, then, it is carefully to be remembered, That
freedom consists in the dependence of the existence, or not
existence of any action, upon our volition of it; and not in the
dependence of any action, or its contrary, on our preference. A man
standing on a cliff, is at liberty to leap twenty yards downwards into
the sea, not because he has a power to do the contrary action, which
is to leap twenty yards upwards, for that he cannot do; but he is
therefore free, because he has a power to leap or not to leap.
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