the inconveniences of them may be represented to a man, by the help of his senses; but how reason representeth anything to the will, I understand no more than the Bishop understands how there may be liberty in children, in beasts, and inanimate creatures. For he seemeth to wonder how children may be left at liberty; how beasts in prison may be set at liberty; and how a river may have a free course; and saith, “What! will he ascribe liberty to inanimate creatures, also?” And thus he thinks he hath made it clear how _necessity_, _spontaneity_, and _liberty_ differ from one another. If the reader find it so, I am contented. (_b_) “His necessity is just such another; a necessity upon supposition, arising from the concourse of all the causes, including the last dictate of the understanding in reasonable creatures,” &c. The Bishop might easily have seen, that the necessity I hold, is the same necessity that he denies; namely, a necessity of things future, that is, an antecedent necessity derived from the very beginning of time; and that I put necessity for an impossibility of not being, and that impossibility as well as possibility are never truly said but of the future. I know as well as he that the cause, when it is adequate, as he calleth it, or entire, as I call it, is together in time with the effect. But for all that, the necessity may be and is before the effect, as much as any necessity can be. And though he call it a necessity of supposition, it is no more so than all other necessity is. The fire burneth necessarily; but not without supposition that there is fuel put to it. And it burneth the fuel, when it is put to it, necessarily; but it is by supposition, that the ordinary course of nature is not hindered; for the fire burnt not the three children in the furnace. (_c_) “But if these causes did operate freely or contingently, if they might have suspended or denied their concurrence, or have concurred after another manner, then the effect was not truly and antecedently necessary, but either free or contingent.”