prejudice remains, which has been long fixed by the use of the terms _necessary_, _must_, &c. the association with these terms of certain ideas, inconsistent with liberty, is not broken, and the judgment is powerfully warped by it; as a thing that has been long bent and grown stiff, if it be straightened, will return to its former curvity again and again.’ The reasoning in the ‘Inquiry’ to which the author here refers, in justification of himself, is as follows: ‘Men in their first use of such phrases as these, _must_, _cannot_, _unavoidable_, _irresistible_, &c. use them to signify a necessity of constraint or restraining a natural necessity or impossibility, or some necessity that the will has nothing to do in. A thing is said to be _necessary_, when we cannot help it, let us do what we will. So any thing is said to be _impossible_ to us, when we would do it, or would have it brought to pass and endeavour it, but all our desires and endeavours are in vain. And that is said to be _irresistible_, which overcomes all our opposition, resistance and endeavour to the contrary. And we are said to be _unable_ to do a thing, when our utmost supposable desires and endeavours to do it are insufficient. All men find, and begin to find in early childhood, that there are innumerable things which cannot be done which they desire to do; and innumerable things, which they are averse to, that must be; they cannot avoid them, whether they choose them or no. It is to express this necessity which men so soon and so often find, and which so greatly affects them in innumerable cases, that such terms and phrases are first formed; and it is to signify such a necessity that they are first used, and that they are most constantly used in the common affairs of life; and not to signify any such metaphysical, speculative and abstract notion as that connexion [between cause and effect] in the nature and course of things, to signify which they who employ themselves in philosophical inquiries into the first origin and metaphysical relations and dependencies of things, have borrowed those terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our cradles in a use of such phrases entirely different from this, or from the one in which they are used in the controversy about liberty and necessity. And it being a dictate of the universal sense of mankind, evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the necessity signified by these terms in the sense in which we first learn them, does excuse persons, and free them from all fault or blame, hence our idea of excusableness or faultlessness is tied to these phrases by a strong habit, which grows up with us;—or if we use the words as terms of art in another sense, yet unless we are exceeding circumspect and wary, we shall insensibly slide into the vulgar use of them, and so apply the words in a very inconsistent manner: this habitual connexion of ideas will deceive and confound us in our reasonings and discourses whenever