Either I am much deceived, or Locke has very well defined liberty to be “power.” I am still further deceived, or Collins, a celebrated magistrate of London, is the only philosopher who has profoundly developed this idea, while Clarke has only answered him as a theologian. Of all that has been written in France on liberty, the following little dialogue has appeared to me the most comprehensive:

A.

A battery of cannon is discharged at our ears; have you the liberty to hear it, or not to hear it, as you please?

B.

Undoubtedly I cannot hinder myself from hearing it.

A.

Are you willing that these cannon shall take off your head and those of your wife and daughter who walk with you?

B.

What a question! I cannot, at least while I am in my right senses, wish such a thing; it is impossible.

A.

Good; you necessarily hear these cannon, and you necessarily wish not for the death of yourself and your family by a discharge from them. You have neither the power of not hearing it, nor the power of wishing to remain here.

B.

That is clear.

A.

You have, I perceive, advanced thirty paces to be out of the reach of the cannon; you have had the power of walking these few steps with me.

B.

That is also very clear.

A.

And if you had been paralytic, you could not have avoided being exposed to this battery; you would necessarily have heard, and received a wound from the cannon; and you would have as necessarily died.

B.

Nothing is more true.

A.

In what then consists your liberty, if not in the power that your body has acquired of performing that which from absolute necessity your will requires?

B.

You embarrass me. Liberty then is nothing more than the power of doing what I wish?

A.

Reflect; and see whether liberty can be understood otherwise.

B.

In this case, my hunting dog is as free as myself; he has necessarily the will to run when he sees a hare; and the power of running, if there is nothing the matter with his legs. I have therefore nothing above my dog; you reduce me to the state of the beasts.

A.

These are poor sophisms, and they are poor sophists who have instructed you. You are unwilling to be free like your dog. Do you not eat, sleep, and propagate like him, and nearly in the same attitudes? Would you smell otherwise than by your nose? Why would you possess liberty differently from your dog?

B.

But I have a soul which reasons, and my dog scarcely reasons at all. He has nothing beyond simple ideas, while I have a thousand metaphysical ideas.

A.

Well, you are a thousand times more free than he is; you have a thousand times more power of thinking than he has; but still you are not free in any other manner than your dog is free.

B.

What! am I not free to will what I like?

A.

What do you understand by that?

B.

I understand what all the world understands. Is it not every day said that the will is free?

A.

An adage is not a reason; explain............