But how can all this happen in a plain matter of fact, supposed to be experienced by everybody? What difficulty can there be in stating a plain matter of fact, and describing what everybody feels? What need of so much philosophy? and why so many contradictions on the subject? And how can all men experience Liberty, when it is allowed that the common notion of Liberty is false, or not experienced; and a new notion of Liberty, not thought on before (or thought on but by few) is set up as matter of experience? This could not happen if matter of fact was clear for Liberty.
3. Other asserters of Liberty seem driven into it on account of supposed inconveniencies attending the doctrine of Necessity. The great Episcopius, in his Treatise of Free-will, acknowledges in effect that the asserters of Necessity have seeming experience on their side, and are thereby very numerous. They,[1] as he observes, allege one thing of moment in which they triumph, viz., “that the will is determined by the understanding: and assert that unless it were so the will would be a blind faculty, and might make evil, as evil, its object, and reject what is pleasant and agreeable, and by consequence that all persuasions, promises, reasonings and threats would be as useless to a man as to a stock or a stone.” This he allows to be very plausible, and to have the appearance of probability; to be the common sentiment of the schools; to be the rock on which the ablest defenders of Liberty have split, without being able to answer it; and to be the reason or argument (or rather the matter of experience) which has made men in all ages, and not a few in this age, fall into the opinion of the fatal Necessity of all things. But because it makes all our actions necessary, and thereby, in his opinion, subverts all religion, laws, rewards and punishments, he concludes it to be most certainly false, and religion makes him quit this common and plausible opinion. Thus also many other strenuous
- ↑ Opera, vol. i., p. 198, 199, 200.
