convinced upon no other principles, and would be the most undisciplinable and untractable of all animals. All advice and all reasonings would be of no use to him. You might offer arguments to him, and lay before him pleasure and pain; and he might stand unmoved like a rock. He might reject what appears true to him, assent to what seems absurd to him, avoid what he sees to be good, and choose what he sees to be evil. Indifference therefore to receive truth, that is Liberty to deny it when we see it; and indifference to pleasure and pain, that is, Liberty to refuse the first, and choose the last; are direct obstacles to knowledge and happiness. On the contrary, to be necessarily determined by what seems reasonable, and by what seems good, has a direct tendency to promote truth and happiness, and is the proper perfection of an understanding and sensible being. And indeed it seems strange that men should allow that God and angels act more perfectly because they are determined by reason; and also allow that clocks, watches, mills, and other artificial unintelligent beings are the better, the more they are determined to go right by weight and measure; and yet that they should deem in a perfection in man not to be determined by his reason, but to have Liberty to go against it.[1] Would it not be as reasonable to say, it would be a perfection in a clock not to be necessarily determined to go right, but to have its motions depend upon chance?
Again, though man does, through weakness and imperfection, fall into several mistakes, both in judging
- ↑ “I protest,” says Professor Huxley in his lecture on Descartes “that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me” (Lay Sermons, p. 340). Professor Huxley has read Collins, and he may have had the above passage in his mind.—G.W.F.
