tion, and about the
institutions of the church. To take away these, they said, is to throw
down the bulwarks of order, and an attempt to take them away, as by
encyclopaedists or others, ought to be punished by the magistrates.
Diderot had for the moment clearly lost himself.

We need hardly be surprised if an article conceived in this spirit
contains no serious contribution to the difficult question with which
it deals. Diderot had persuaded himself that, without Free Will, all
those emotional moralities in the way of sympathy and benevolence and
justice which he adored would be lowered to the level of mere mechanism.
"If men are not free in what they do of good and evil, then," he cries,
in what is surely a paroxysm of unreason, "good is no longer good, and
evil no longer evil." As if the outward quality and effects of good and
evil were not independent of the mental operations which precede human
action. Murder would not cease to be an evil simply because it had been
proved that the murderer's will to do a bad deed was the result of
antecedents. Acts have marks and consequences of their own, good or bad,
whatever may be the state of mind of those who do them. But Diderot does
not seem to divine the true issue; he writes as if Necessarians or
Determinists denied the existence of volitions, and as if the question
were whether volitions do exist. Nobody denies that they exist; the real
question is of the conditions under which they exist. Are they
determined by antecedents, or are they self-determined, spontaneous, and
unconnected? Is Will independent of cause?

Diderot's argumentation is, in fact, merely a protest that man is
conscious of a Will. And just as in other parts of his article Diderot
by Liberty means only the existence of Will, so by Liberty he means only
the healthy condition of the soul, and not its independence of
causation. We need not waste words on so dire a confusion, nor on the
theory that Will is sometimes dependent on cerebral antecedents and
sometimes not. The curious thing is that the writer should not have
perceived that he was himself in this preposterous theory propounding
the very principle which he denounced as destructive to virtue, ruinous
to society, and worthy of punishment by the government. For it seems
that, after all, the Will of those whose "dispositions are not moderate"
is not free; and we may surely say that those whose dispositions are
least moderate, are exactly the most viole