waters, which press forward the former. Either the river wants liberty for both, or else it wants liberty for neither. But to leave his metaphorical faculties, and his catachrestical liberty: how far is his discourse wide from the true moral liberty; which is the question between us? His former description of a free agent, that is, ‘he who hath not made an end of deliberating’, though it was wide from the mark, yet it came much nearer the truth than this definition of liberty; unless perhaps he think that the water hath done deliberating whether it will go over the banks, but hath not done deliberating whether it will go up the channel”. ANIMADVERSIONS UPON THE ANSWER TO NO. XXIX. (_a_) “How that should be a right definition of liberty, which comprehends neither the genus nor the difference, neither the matter nor the form of liberty, &c: how a real faculty or the elective power, should be defined by a negation or by an absence: is past my understanding, and contrary to all the rules of right reason which I have learned.” A right definition is that which determineth the signification of the word defined, to the end that in the discourse where it is used, the meaning of it may be constant and without equivocation. This is the measure of a definition, and intelligible to an English reader. But the Bishop, that measures it by the genus and the difference, thinks, it seems, though he write English, he writes not to an English reader unless he also be a Schoolman. I confess the rule is good, that we ought to define, when it can be done, by using first some more general term, and then by restraining the signification of that general term, till it be the same with that of the word defined. And this general term the School calls _genus_, and the restraint _difference_. This, I say, is a good rule where it can be done; for some words are so general, that they cannot admit a more general in their definition. But why this ought to be a law of definition, I doubt it would trouble him to find the reason; and therefore I refer him (he shall give me leave sometimes to cite, as well as he,) to the fourteenth and fifteenth articles of the sixth chapter of my book _De Corpore_. But it is to little purpose that he requires in a definition so exactly the genus and the difference, seeing he does not know them when they are there. For in this my definition of liberty, the genus is absence of impediments to action; and the difference or restriction is that they be not contained in the nature of the agent. The Bishop therefore, though he talk of genus and difference, understands not what they are, but requires the matter and form of the thing in the definition. Matter is body, that is to say, corporeal substance, and subject to dimension, such as are the elements, and the things compounded of the elements. But it is impossible that matter should be part of a definition, whose parts are only words; or to put the name of matter into the definition of