‘The last thing in which also consisteth the whole controversy, namely, that there is no such thing as an agent, which when all things requisite to action are present, can nevertheless forbear to produce it; or (which is all one) that there is no such thing as freedom from necessity, is easily inferred from that which hath been before alleged. For if it be an agent it can work, and if it work there is nothing wanting of what is requisite to produce the action, and consequently the cause of the action is sufficient, and if sufficient, then also necessary, as hath been proved before. And thus you see how the inconveniences, which it is objected must follow upon the holding of necessity, are avoided, and the necessity itself demonstratively proved. To which I could add, if I thought it good logic, the inconvenience of denying necessity, as that it destroyeth both the decrees and the prescience of God Almighty; for whatsoever God hath purposed to bring to pass by man, as an instrument, or foreseeth shall come to pass; a man, if he have liberty as hath been affirmed from necessitation, might frustrate, and make not to come to pass, and God should either not foreknow it, and not decree it, or he should foreknow such things shall be, as shall never be, and decree that which shall never come to pass. This is all that hath come into my mind touching this question since I last considered it.’ The letter from which the foregoing extract is taken is addressed to the Marquis of Newcastle, and dated at Rouen in 1651, twenty years before the publication of Spinoza’s most exact and beautiful demonstration of the same principle. Some of Hobbes’s antagonists had charged him with having borrowed his arguments from Marsennus, a French author; to which in one of his controversial tracts Hobbes replies with some contempt, that this Marsennus had heard him talk on the subject when he was in Paris, and had borrowed them from him. Dr. Priestley has done justice to Hobbes on this question of necessity, and I suspect more than justice in denying that the Stoics were acquainted with the same principle. At any rate, the modern commentators on the subject (and Dr. Priestley among them) have added nothing to it but absurdities, from which our author’s logic protected him; for he seldom reasoned wrong but when he reasoned from wrong premises. As this question is one of the most interesting in the history of philosophy, I shall perhaps be excused for adding one more extract (of considerable length) to prove that Hobbes is not, in this instance, chargeable with the practical inferences which have been made from his doctrine. In answer to the objections of Bishop Bramhall, with whom he had a controversy on the subject, he says: