“All things,” says he, “determined to such and such actions, are determined by God; and, if God determines not a thing to act, it cannot determine itself.”(12) From this proposition he drew the inference, that things which are produced by God, could not have existed in any other manner, nor in any other order.(13) Thus, by the divine power, all things in heaven and earth are bound together in the iron circle of necessity. It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that “the soul is a spiritual automaton,” and possesses no such liberty as is usually ascribed to it. All is necessary, and the very notion of a free-will is a vulgar prejudice. “All I have to say,” he coolly remarks, “to those who believe that they can speak or keep silence—in one word, can act—by virtue of a free decision of the soul, is, that they dream with their eyes open.”(14) Though he thus boldly denies all free-will, according to the common notion of mankind; yet, no less than Hobbes and Collins, he allows that the soul possesses “a sort of liberty.” “It is free,” says he, in the act of affirming that “two and two are equal to four;” thus finding the freedom of the soul which he is pleased to allow the world to possess in the most perfect type of necessity it is possible to conceive.