When Edwards once reaches the truism that a thing is always as itself, he feels perfectly secure, and defies with unbounded confidence the utmost efforts of his opponents to dislodge him. “As we observed before,” says he, “nothing is more evident than that, when men act voluntarily, and do what they please, then they do what appears most agreeable to them; and to say otherwise, would be as much as to affirm, that men do not choose what appears to suit them best, or what seems most pleasing to them; or that they do not choose what they prefer—_which brings the matter to a contradiction_.” True; this brings the matter to a contradiction, as he has repeatedly told us; for choosing, and preferring, or willing, are all one. But if any one denies that a man does what he pleases when he does what he pleases; or if he affirms that he pleases without pleasing, or chooses without choosing, or prefers without preferring, we shall leave him to the logic of the necessitarian and the physician. We have no idea that he will ever be able to refute the volumes that have been written to confound him. President Edwards clearly has the better of him; for he puts “the soul in a state of choice,” and yet affirms that it “has no choice.” He might as well say, indeed, that “a body may move while it is in a state of rest,” as to say that “the mind may choose without choosing,” or without having a choice. He is very clearly involved in an absurdity; and if he can read the three hundred pages of the Inquiry, without being convinced of his error, his case must indeed be truly hopeless. Edwards is far from being the only necessitarian who has fallen into the error of identifying the sensibility with the will; thus reducing his doctrine to an unassailable truism. In his famous controversy with Clarke, Leibnitz has done the same thing. “Thus,” says he, “in truth, the motives comprehend all the dispositions which the mind can have to act voluntarily; for they include not only reasons, but also the inclinations and passions, or other preceding impressions. Wherefore if the mind should prefer a weak inclination to a strong one, _it would act against itself, and otherwise than it is disposed to act_.” Now is it not wonderful, that so profound a thinker, and so acute a metaphysician, as Leibnitz, should have supposed that he was engaged in a controversy to show that the mind never acts otherwise than it acts; that it never acts against itself? Having reduced his doctrine to this truism, he says, this “shows that the author’s notions, contrary to mine, are superficial, and appear to have no solidity in them, when they are well considered.” True, the notions of Clarke were superficial, and worse than superficial, if he supposed that the mind ever acts contrary to its act, or otherwise than it really acts. But Clarke distinguished between the disposition and the will.