Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/34

 asserters of Liberty as well as himself are driven by these supposed difficulties to deny manifest experience. I say manifest experience, for are we not manifestly determined by pleasure or pain, and by what seems reasonable or unreasonable to us, to judge, or will, or act? Whereas could they see that there are not grounds for laws and morality, rewards and punishments, but by supposing the doctrine of Necessity; and that there is no foundation for laws and morality, rewards and punishments, upon the supposition of a man’s being a free agent (as shall evidently and demonstratively appear) they would readily allow experience to be against Free-will and deny Liberty when they should see there was no need to assert it, in order to maintain those necessary things. And as a farther evidence thereof, let any man peruse the discourses written by the ablest authors for Liberty, and he will see (as they confess of one another) that they frequently contradict themselves, write obscurely, and know not where to place Liberty; at least he will see that he is able to make nothing of their discourses, no more than Mr. Locke was of this treatise of Episcopius, who in all his other writings shows himself to be a clear, strong and argumentative writer.

4. There are others, and those contenders for Liberty, as well as deniers of it, who report the persuasions of men, as to the matter of fact, very differently, and also judge very differently themselves about the fact, from what is vulgarly believed among those who mantain Free-will.

An ancient author speaks thus : Fate, says he, is sufficiently proved from the general received opinion and persuasion of men thereof. For in certain things, when men all agree, except a few who dissent from them on account of maintaining some doctrines before taken up, they cannot be mistaken. Wherefore Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, though no contemptible