reproach which may be said to attach to him for this incitement to persecution.[1]
Collins deemed it prudent to pay a visit to his friends in Holland. He was in consequence ridiculed by those who had been crying out for persecution. But he was not idle. In 1715 he returned to England, and retired to Essex, where he acted as Justice of the Peace, as he had done before in the County of Middlesex and the Liberty of Westminster. In the same year he published the work here reprinted.
Dr. Samuel Clarke, in his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) had replied to Spinoza’s arguments in proof of Necessity. To this Collins had evidently an eye when he said “Liberty is contended for by its patrons as a great perfection.” He only mentions “the most acute and ingenious Dr. Clarke,” however, towards the close of the work, when he adroitly quotes him to show that by his own admissions as to Moral Necessity he was in fact a Necessitarian. To this Clarke replied that Moral Necessity was no Necessity at all. It is notable that modern metaphysicians like Dr. Hutchinson Stirling take exactly the contrary view.
Clarke having contended against Collins that the doctrine of Necessity was opposed to religion and morality, the Freethinker did not deem fit to run the risk of persecution by provoking further controversy with his opponent. His later Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, a tract of but 23 pages, was not published until after the death of Clarke and in the year of his own decease, 1729.
It is, however, upon the little work here reprinted that the fame of Collins as a philosopher securely rests. The writer of the article on Collins in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.) says: “His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) gives, in a remarkably clear and concise form, all the important arguments in favor of his theory, with able and suggestive replies to the chief objections which have been urged against
- ↑ It is, of course, open to any friend of Berkeley, whose goodness of heart was as undoubted as his genius, to argue that he did not intend any incitement to persecution; air and water being the common benefits of “Providence,” whom Collins had presumably insulted, and not such things as men are usually deprived of by their persecutors.
