(_a_) “This short section might pass, but for two things; one is, that he confounds a voluntary act with a free act.” I do indeed take all voluntary acts to be free, and all free acts to be voluntary; but withal that all acts, whether free or voluntary, if they be acts, were necessary before they were acts. But where is the error? ‘A free act’, saith he, ‘is only that which proceeds from the free election of the rational will, after deliberation; but every act that proceeds from the sensitive appetite of man or beast, without deliberation or election, is truly voluntary.’ So that my error lies in this, that I distinguish not between a rational will and a sensitive appetite in the same man. As if the appetite and will in man or beast were not the same thing, or that sensual men and beasts did not deliberate, and choose one thing before another, in the same manner that wise men do. Nor can it be said of wills, that one is rational, the other sensitive; but of men. And if it be granted that deliberation is always (as it is not) rational, there were no cause to call men rational more than beasts. For it is manifest by continual experience, that beasts do deliberate. (_b_) “The other thing observable is his conclusion, that ‘it is all one to say, a man is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating’: which confession of his overturns his whole structure of absolute necessity.” Why so? ‘Because’, saith he, ‘if every agent be necessitated to act what he doth act by extrinsical causes, then he is no more free before he deliberates, or whilst he deliberates, than he is after’. But this is a false consequence; he should have inferred thus:--“then he is no less necessitated before he deliberates than he is after”; which is true, and yet nevertheless he is more free. But taking necessity to be inconsistent with liberty, which is the question between us: instead of _necessitated_ he puts in _not free_. And therefore to say ‘a man is free till he hath made an end of deliberating’, is no contradiction to absolute and antecedent necessity. And whereas he adds presently after, that I ascribe the necessitation of a man in free acts to his own deliberation, and in indeliberate acts to his last thoughts: he mistakes the matter. For I ascribe all necessity to the universal series or order of causes, depending on the first cause eternal: which the Bishop understandeth, as if I had said in his phrase, to a special influence of extrinsical causes; that is, understandeth it not at all.