Mr. Locke’s chapter ‘On Power,’ in the first volume of the Essay, contains his account of liberty and necessity, and has been more found fault with than any other part of his work; I think without reason. He seems evidently to have admitted the definition of necessity, though he has avoided the name, which is not much to be wondered at, considering the misconception to which it is liable, and which can scarcely be separated from it in the closest reasoning, much less as a term of general signification. In other words, he denies the power of the mind to act without a cause or motive, or, in any manner in any circumstances, from mere indifferency and absolute self motion; but he at the same time rejects the inference which has been drawn from this principle, that the mind is not an agent at all, but entirely subject to external force or blind impulse. What he has said is little more than an expansion of Hobbes’s general description of practical liberty, ‘that it is a power to do, if we will.’ Thus, according to Mr. Locke, it would not be so absurd to give a restive horse the spur or the whip to make him go straight forward on a plain road, as it would be in order to make him leap up a precipice a hundred feet high. The one the horse has a power or liberty to do if he will, the other he has no power to do at any rate. That is, here are two sorts of impediments, one that may be overcome, and which it is right to take means to overcome, and another which cannot be overcome, and which it is therefore absurd to meddle with. To say that these two necessities are in effect the same, is an abuse of language; yet for not lumping them together in the dashing style of our modern wholesale dealers in paradox, Mr. Locke has been made the subject of endless abuse and contumely. The difference between them, as stated by this author with great force and earnestness of feeling, in truth constitutes all that men in general mean when they talk of freedom of will, and make it, as in this sense it is, the ground-work of morality. There are certain powers which the mind has of governing not only the actions of the body, but of regulating its own thoughts and desires, and it is to make us exert these powers that all the distinctions, rules and sanctions of morality have been established. It must be ridiculous to attempt to make us do, what upon the face of the thing it was known we could not do; yet it is on this literal and unqualified interpretation of the term, as implying a flat impossibility of the contrary, an utter incapacity and helplessness in the mind, a concurrence of causes foreign to the will itself, and irresistible in their effect, and with which it must therefore be in vain to contend, that most of the consequences from the doctrine of necessity have been built; such as that reward and punishment are absurd and improper, that virtue and vice are words without a meaning, that the assassin is no