more a moral or accountable agent than the dagger which he uses, and many others of the same stamp. The sword and the assassin would be equally moral and accountable agents, if they were both equally accessible to moral motives, that is, to reward and punishment, praise and blame, &c.; but they are not. This seems to be a distinction of great pith and moment. It is said to be a mere difference of words; at least it makes all the difference whether such motives as reward and punishment, praise and blame, should be applied or not, and this one should think was a difference of practice. It is objected, indeed, that still both are equally necessary agents. But this appears to me to be a confusion of words. It is in vain to exhort flame not to burn, or to be angry with poison for working: and it would be equally in vain to exhort men to certain actions or to resent others, if exhortation and resentment had no more effect upon them, that is, if they were really governed by the same sort of blind, physical, unreasoning, unresisting necessity. In fact, the latest necessarians have abandoned the true, original, philosophical meaning of the term, in which it implies no more than the connection between cause and effect, and have substituted for it the prejudiced notion of their adversaries, who confound it with mechanical necessity, ‘fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,’ or the unconditional _fiat_ of omnipotence. The following extracts which I shall condense as much as I can consistently with the nature of the argument, will shew the view which Mr. Locke has taken of this subject. I would only observe, by the by, that I so far agree with Hobbes and differ from Mr. Locke, in thinking that liberty in the most extended and abstract sense is applicable to material as well as voluntary agents; moral liberty, _i.e._ freedom of will evidently is not, because such agents have no such faculty. ‘All the actions that we have any idea of,’ says my author, ‘reducing themselves to these two, _viz._ thinking and moving, so far as a man has a power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power, wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind, directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary. Where any particular action is not in the power of the agent, to be produced by him according to his volition, there he is not at liberty; that agent is under necessity. So that liberty cannot be where there is no thought, no volition, no will; but there may be thought, there may be volition, there may be will, where there is no liberty. A little consideration of an obvious instance or two may make this clear.