nt malefactors against the
common weal. One more passage is worth quoting to show how little the
writer had seized the true meaning of the debate. "According to you," he
says to Bayle, "it is not clear that it is at the pure choice of my will
to move my arm or not to move it: if that be so, it is then necessarily
determined that within a quarter of an hour from now I shall lift my
hand three times together, or that I shall not. Now, if you seriously
pretend that I am not free, you cannot refuse an offer that I make you;
I will wager a thousand pistoles to one that I will do, in the matter of
moving my hand, exactly the opposite to what you back; and you may take
your choice. If you do think the wager fair, it can only be because of
your necessary and invincible judgment that I am free." As if the will
to move or not to move the arm would be uncaused and unaffected by
antecedents, when you have just provided so strong an antecedent as the
desire to save a thousand pistoles. It was, perhaps, well enough for
Voltaire to content himself with vague poetical material for his
poetical discourse on Liberty, but from Diderot, whether as editor or as
writer, something better might have been expected than a clumsy
reproduction of the reasoning by which men like Turretini had turned
philosophy into the corrupted handmaid of theology.

The most extraordinary thing about this extraordinary article still
remains to be told. It was written, we may suppose, between 1757 and
1762, or about that time. In June, 1756, Diderot wrote to a certain
Landois, a fellow-worker on the Encyclopaedia, a letter containing the
most emphatic possible repudiation of the whole doctrine of Liberty.
"Liberty is a word void of sense; there are not and there never can have
been free beings; we are only what fits in with the general order, with
organisation, with education, and with the chain of events. We can no
more conceive a being acting without a motive than we can conceive one
of the arms of a balance acting without a weight; and the motive is
always exterior and foreign to us, attached either by nature or by some
cause or other that is not ourselves. _There is only one sort of causes,
properly speaking, and those are, physical causes._"[188] And so forth
in the vein of hard and remorseless necessarianism, which we shall find
presently in the pages of the System of Nature.[189]

There is only one explanation of this flagrant contradiction. Diderot
must h