whole or suitable to the circumstances in which he acts.*

Between this and animal liberty it is interest

"By the liberty of a moral agent," says Dr. Reid, "I understand a power over the determinations of his own will." Essay iv. chap. i. This power this sound and judicious philosopher very properly styles moral liberty. Leibnitz, though a necessitarian, entertains similar views. His account of liberty is so just and elegant that I may be allowed in this place to make the quotation. La liberté du fait consiste ou dans la puissance de vouloir comme il faut ; ou dans la puissance de faire ce qu'on veut. La liberté de vouloir est encore prise en deux sens differens. L'un est quand on l'oppose à l'imperfection ou à l'usage de l'esprit qui est une coaction ou contrainte, mais interne comme cela qui vient des passions. L'autre sens a lieu quand on oppose la liberté à la necessité. Dans le premier sens, les Stoïciens disoient que le sage seul est libre; et en effet on n'a point l'esprit libre quand il est occupé d'une grande passion; car on ne peut point vouloir alors comme il faut, c'est à dire, avec la deliberation qui est requise. C'est ainsi que Dieu seul est parfaitement libre, et que les esprits crées ne le sentent que à mesure qu'ils sont au dessus des passions. Et cette liberté regarde proprement notre entendement, L'Entendement Humain, Liv. ii. chap. 21, § 8. "Free agency consists either in the power of willing what is right, or in the power of doing what we will. The liberty of willing is again taken in two different senses. The one is, when they contrast it with that compulsion or constraint which arises from the passions within (disallowed passions of course); the other when they contrast it with necessity (philosophical necessity or causation). In the first sense, the Stoicks maintained that the wise man alone is free and surely the mind is not free when it is hurried away by the violence of passion; for at that time one cannot will as he ought, that is, as his deliberate judgment approves. Thus God alone is completely free; and created minds are free only in so far as they are superior to their passions. This freedom regards properly the understanding (that is, not the voluntary but the moral being)." This is the true account of human agency, and just what we are here endeavouring to illustrate;

In

ing to observe the analogy. When in the exercise of physical power a man is able to execute his volition, he is rightly said to enjoy animal or physical freedom; and when, in like manner, in the exercise of moral power, consisting in desire and feeling, he is able to will in the manner he judges right, he is in possession of moral liberty, The former is power to act in consequence of a determination of will; the latter is power to will in consequence of a decision of judgment. instances of necessity of either sort, the case is just the reverse. We are under animal necessity, when from the resistance of a superior physical force, we are unable to act as we will; but we labour under moral necessity, if, in any instance, from the presence of feeling of which our judgment disapproves, we are unable to resolve to act in the manner which we consider right or advantageous. In both species of necessity, there is opposition which we are unable to overcome. In animal necessity, it is offered from without; in moral, it arises within, from feelings and desires which the conscience condemns. All liberty therefore is the enjoyment of power; necessity is the result of weakness. And as in the physical world there is no distinction more obvious and better understood than that of strength and weakness, it is easy, by observing the like distinc

though this able metaphysician did not always distinctly perceive the extent of his own principle. The liberty opposed to causation he properly rejects as absurd and contradictory.

tion in the moral department of our nature, to form a clear idea of moral liberty and necessity. And let it be observed, that important as is the distinction of weak and strong in the material world, it involves no consequences in any respect so momentous as the similar distinction in the moral. On moral liberty and necessity depend innocence or guilt, with all their happy or baneful effects in the present life, and all the momentous and awful consequences in the future.*

Beyond the point to which we have now come the question of liberty and necessity should not perhaps, in strict propriety, be carried; for it is only as an animal or moral agent that man exhibits any transitive acts of power, to which alone liberty properly belongs. But were the inquiry to be pushed further, man is to be considered purely as an intelligent and contemplative being, and a similar distinction is observed as in the physical and moral departments of his nature. As the essential attribute of such a being is to

The reader will scarcely be in danger of being misled by what is usually called moral necessity; which takes place when the will is determined in whatever manner, and is plainly just philosophical necessity or causation. Every volition, of course, is, in this sense necessary, that is, in other words, it has a cause; but the true question of liberty and necessity, as Dr. Clarke, in his remarks on Collins, justly though somewhat obscurely shows, is whether the intelligent being himself is the cause or some other principle of which he disapproves. To have confounded these two opposite states of the moral agent, one of which is real necessity, under the general name of moral necessity, has been the cause of much of the confusion in which this interesting subject is involved. See more of this in the remarks on Edwards.

perceive truth, he must be esteemed free when he perceives things to be as they really are; but to lie under intellectual necessity when, from mental weakness or the derangement of his faculties, he mistakes falsehood for truth. There are here, as in the cases above, two conditions of the intelligent being of an opposite nature; and if one is confessedly necessity, the other must be liberty. As animal and moral freedom is the exercise of physical and moral power, so intellectual power is the ground of intellectual liberty, and of course the opposite state of mental weakness or ignorance must be considered intellectual necessity. The same contrast is found in the human agent as an animal, a moral and an intelligent being, and if the propriety of the distinction be admitted in the first respects, it cannot be denied in the last.

Viewing then human liberty or necessity in these three aspects, we exhaust the whole subject; for there is no need to imitate Mr. Hume and consider man as purely material, possessing properties in common with inanimate matter. Animal liberty regards him as an agent, possessing merely the power of voluntary motion; intellectual liberty views him as an intelligent and rational being; while moral liberty respects him as uniting both these, in one complex nature, and constituting a moral agent.

Thus it appears that the whole inquiry, respecting liberty and necessity, is reduced to a

simple question of fact, is man such an agent as has been described, or is he not? And how indeed should it be otherwise? An agent is a voluntary or intelligent cause; and if man really be such a cause, and not merely a passive subject, he enjoys freedom co-extensive with his power, limited indeed in degree, as that of all finite beings must be, but not different in kind from that of the Almighty, whose sovereignty can consist in nothing more than the power of acting, in all things, according to his own good pleasure. If a voluntary agent do as he will, what other liberty can he conceive or desire? If a moral agent fix his volition as he judges right, or most advantageous and proper, why should he will otherwise, and how can he will better? And if he judge true what is really true, and right what is really right, can the infinite understanding even of the Deity, in the given instance, do more? There is here no necessity, as shall afterwards be more fully shown, but that implied in the fact of existence that things cannot be and not be simultaneously. In this fact the whole inquiry respecting liberty is involved. Is man really a sentient, intelligent, and moral agent? If he is so, his freedom may admit of augmentation in degree, but in kind it is already perfect, for it is similar to that of the all-perfect Creator, with whose moral image man was endowed. If, on the other hand, he were not an agent, but a