Is it not strange that Mr. Hazlitt, after adopting this definition of liberty, should have supposed that he allowed a real freedom to the will? “I prefer exceedingly,” says he, “to the modern instances of a couple of billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysippus.” We cannot very well see, how the instance of a cylinder is so great an improvement on that of a billiard-ball; especially as a sphere, and not a cylinder, is free to move in all directions. The truth is, we must quit the region of dead, inert, passive matter, if we would form an idea of the true meaning of the term liberty, as applied to the activity of living agents. Mr. Hazlitt evidently loses himself amid the ambiguities of language, when he says, that “I so far agree with Hobbes and differ from Locke, in thinking that liberty, in the most extended and abstracted sense, is applicable to _material as well as voluntary agents_.” Still this very acute writer makes a few feeble and ineffectual efforts to raise our notion of the liberty of moral agents above that given by the illustration of Chrysippus in Cicero. “My notion of a free agent, I confess,” says he, “is not that represented by Mr. Hobbes, namely, one that when all things necessary to produce the effect are present, can nevertheless not produce it; but I believe a free-agent of whatever kind is one which, where all things necessary to produce the effect are present, can produce it; its own operation not being hindered by anything else. The body is said to be free when it has the power to obey the direction of the will; so the will may be said to be free when it has the power to obey the dictates of the understanding.”(11) Thus the liberty of the will is made to consist not in the denial that its volitions are produced, but in the absence of impediments which might hinder its operations from taking effect. This idea of liberty, it is evident, is perfectly consistent with the materialistic fatalism of Hobbes, which is so much admired by Mr. Hazlitt. Section III. The sentiments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche, concerning the relation between liberty and necessity. No one was ever more deeply implicated in the scheme of necessity than Descartes. “Mere philosophy,” says he, “is enough to make us know that there cannot enter the least thought into the mind of man, but God must will and have willed from all eternity that it should enter there.” His argument in proof of this position is short and intelligible. “God,” says he, “could not be absolutely perfect if there could happen anything in this world which did not spring entirely from him.” Hence it follows, that it is inconsistent with the absolute perfections of God to suppose that a being created by him could put forth a volition which does not spring entirely from him, and not even in part from the creature.