follows necessarily the last dictate of the understanding, this is not destructive of the Liberty of the will; this is only an hypothetical necessity.” So that Liberty with him consists in choosing or refusing necessarily after deliberation; which choosing or refusing is morally and hypothetically determined, or necessary by virtue of the said deliberation.
Lastly, a great Armenian theologer, who has writ a course of Philosophy and entered into several controversies on the subject of Liberty, makes Liberty to consist in “an indifferency of mind while a thing is under deliberation”[1] “For,” says he, “while the mind deliberates it is free till the moment of action; because nothing determines it necessarily to act or not to act.” Whereas when the mind balances or compares ideas or motives together, it is then no less necessarily determined to a state of indifferency by the appearances of those ideas and motives, than it is necessarily determined in the very moment of action. Were a man to be at liberty in this state of indifferency he ought to have it in his power to be not indifferent, at the same time that he is indifferent.
If experience therefore proves the Liberty contended for by the foregoing asserters of Liberty, it proves men to have no Liberty from Necessity.
2. As the foregoing asserters of Liberty give us definitions of Liberty, as grounded on experience, which are consistent with Necessity, so some of the greatest patrons of Liberty do by their concessions in this matter sufficiently destroy all argument from experience.
Erasmus, in his treatise for Free-will against Luther, says, That among the difficulties which have exercised the theologers and philosophers of all ages, there is none greater than the question of free-will.[2] And M. Le Clerc, speaking of this book of Erasmus, says that
