emotions, see the better and follow the worse, there would
be nothing to prevent their believing that we are free in all
things. Thus an infant believes that of its own free will it
desires milk, an angry child believes that it freely desires
to run away; further, a drunken man believes that he utters
from the free decision of his mind words which, when he
is sober, he would willingly have withheld: thus, too, a
delirious man, a garrulous woman, a child, and others
of like complexion, believe that they speak from the free
decision of their mind, when they are in reality unable to
restrain their impulse to talk. Experience teaches us no
less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be
free, simply because they are conscious of their actions,
and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are
determined; and, further, it is plain that the dictates of the
mind are but another name for the appetites, and therefore
vary according to the varying state of the body. Everyone
shapes his actions according to his emotion, those who are
assailed by conflicting emotions know not what they wish;
those who are not attacked by any emotion are readily swayed
this way or that. All these considerations clearly show that
a mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state,
are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing, which
we call decision, when it is regarded under and explained
through the attribute of thought, and a conditioned state, when
it is regarded under the attribute of extension, and deduced
from the laws of motion and rest. This will appear yet more
plainly in the sequel. For the present I wish to call attention
to another point, namely, that we cannot act by the decision
of the mind, unless we have a remembrance of having done
so. For instance, we cannot say a word without remembering
that we have done so. Again, it is not within the free power
of the mind to remember or forget a thing at will. Therefore
the freedom of the mind must in any case be limited to the
power of uttering or not uttering something which it remembers.
But when we dream that we speak, we believe that we speak
from a free decision of the mind, yet we do not speak, or, if we
do, it is by a spontaneous motion of the body. Again, we
dream that we are concealing something, and we seem to act
from the same decision of the mind as that, whereby we keep
silence when awake concerning something we know. Lastly,
we dream that from the free decision of our mind we do
something, which we should not dare to do when awake.