_J. D._ “The first argument is _Herculeum_ or _baculinum_, drawn from that pleasant passage between Zeno and his man. The servant had committed some petty larceny, and the master was cudgelling him well for it. The servant thinks to creep under his master’s blind side, and pleads for himself that ‘the necessity of destiny did compel him to steal.’ The master answers, ‘the same necessity of destiny compels me to beat thee.’ He that denies liberty, is fitter to be refuted with rods than with arguments, until he confess that it is free for him that beats him, either to continue striking, or to give over, that is, to have true liberty.” _T. H._ Of the arguments from reason, the first is that which he saith is drawn from Zeno’s beating of his man, which is therefore called _argumentum baculinum_, that is to say, a wooden argument. The story is this. Zeno held that all actions were necessary. His man therefore, being for some fault beaten, excused himself upon the necessity of it. To avoid this excuse, his master pleaded likewise the necessity of beating him. So that not he that maintained, but he that derided the necessity of things, was beaten; contrary to that he would infer; and the argument was rather withdrawn, than drawn, from the story. _J. D._ “Whether the argument be withdrawn from the story, or the answer withdrawn from the argument, let the reader judge. T. H. mistakes the scope of the reason, the strength whereof doth not lie, neither in the authority of Zeno, a rigid Stoic, which is not worth a button in this cause; nor in the servant’s being an adversary to stoical necessity. For it appears not out of the story, that the servant did deride necessity, but rather that he pleaded it in good earnest for his own justification. Now in the success of the fray, we were told even now, that no power doth justify an action, but only that which is irresistible. Such was not Zeno’s. And therefore it advantageth neither of their causes, neither that of Zeno, nor this of T. H. What if the servant had taken the staff out of his master’s hand, and beaten him soundly, would not the same argument have served the man as well as it did the master, that the necessity of destiny did compel him to strike again? Had not Zeno smarted justly for his paradox? And might not the spectators well have taken up the judge’s apothegm, concerning the dispute between Corax and his scholar, ‘an ill egg of an ill bird’? But the strength of this argument lies _partly_ in the ignorance of Zeno, that great champion of necessity, and the beggarliness of his cause, which admitted no defence but with a cudgel. No man, saith the servant, ought to be beaten for doing that which he is compelled inevitably to do: but I am compelled inevitably to steal. The major is so evident, that it cannot be denied. If a strong man shall take a weak man’s hand per force, and do violence with it to a third person, he whose hand is forced, is innocent, and he only culpable who compelled him.