Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/5



resolved to reprint Anthony Collins’s little treatise on Liberty and Necessity—or, as it is now called, Free Will and Determinism—I asked my friend and colleague, Mr. J. M. Wheeler, to supply a biographical introduction. He has an intimate knowledge of eighteenth-century Freethought and Freethinkers in England, and his introduction does justice to one who as a man, as well as a philosopher, deserves a better fate than oblivion or neglect.

Many years ago I picked up a copy of Collins’s essay on a London street-bookstall, and I was struck with its power and lucidity. He was the opposite of a mystagogue. Constitutionally averse to the great school of learned and super-subtle metaphysicians, he never raised a dust and complained he could not see. He thought clearly—perhaps because he thought freely—and expressed himself in the same manner. Whoever fails to understand Collins, fails from inability to follow an abstract argument.

Collins does not use a superfluous word, he goes straight to the heart of the matter, and is careless of adornment. M. Fonsegrive, in his learned and laborious Essai sur le Libre Arbitre, sa Théorie et son Histoire, remarks that “like other popularisers of impiety, Collins invented no new argument; he borrowed from here and there, and gave simplicity and clearness to the arguments of professional philosophers.” But who is able to invent a new argument on such a well-threshed topic? The lasting merit of Collins is that he gave an inimitable bird’s-eye view of the whole territory in dispute. This,