ou receive your wish, you
wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong
in any way to your will.

You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I
have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more
than how the world was made. All that is given to us is to grope for
what passes in our incomprehensible machine.

The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free
will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics
have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause,
is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

Where will be liberty then? in the power to do what one wills. I wish to
leave my study, the door is open, I am free to leave it.

But, say you, if the door is closed, and I wish to stay at home, I stay
there freely. Let us be explicit. You exercise then the power that you
have of staying; you have this power, but you have not that of going
out.

The liberty about which so many volumes have been written is, therefore,
reduced to its accurate terms, only the power of acting.

In what sense then must one utter the phrase--"Man is free"? in the same
sense that one utters the words, health, strength, happiness. Man is not
always strong, always healthy, always happy.

A great passion, a great obstacle, deprive him of his liberty, his power
of action.

The word "liberty," "free-will," is therefore an abstract word, a
general word, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not state
that all men are always beautiful, good and just; similarly, they are
not always free.

Let us go further: this liberty being only the power of acting, what is
this power? It is the effect of the constitution and present state of
our organs. Leibnitz wishes to resolve a geometrical problem, he has an
apoplectic fit, he certainly has not liberty to resolve his problem. Is
a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistress in
his arms, free to tame his passion? undoubtedly not. He has the power of
enjoying, and has not the power of refraining. Locke was therefore very
right to call liberty "power." When is it that this young man can
refrain despite the violence of his passion? when a stronger idea
determines in a contrary sense the activity of his body and his soul.

But what! the other animals will have the same liberty, then, the same
power? Why not? They have senses, memory, feeling, percep