Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/76

 power to perform the material action, but because it is morally impossible that with a perfect knowledge of what is best and without any temptation to evil, their will should determine itself to choose to act foolishly and unreasonably.”

In this he plainly allows the necessity for which I have contended. For he assigns the same causes of human actions that I have done, and extends the necessity of human actions as far, when he asserts that a man cannot under those causes possibly do the contrary to what he does; and particularly that a man under the circumstances of judging it unreasonable to hurt or destroy himself, and being under no temptation or external violence, cannot possibly act contrary to that judgment. And as to a natural or physical power in man to act contrary to that judgment, and to hurt or destroy himself, which is asserted in the foregoing passage, that is so far from being inconsistent with the doctrine of Necessity, that the said natural power to do the contrary, or to hurt or destroy himself, is a consequence of the doctrine of Necessity. For if man is necessarily determined by particular moral causes, and cannot then possibly act contrary to what he does, he must under opposite moral causes, have a power to do the contrary. Man as determined by moral causes, cannot possibly choose evil as evil, and by consequence chooses life before death, while he apprehends life to be a good and death to be an evil; as, on the contrary, he chooses death before life, while he apprehends death to be a good and life to be an evil. And thus moral causes, by being different from one another, or differently understood, do determine men differently, and by consequence suppose a natural power to choose and act as differently as those causes differently determine them.

If therefore men will be governed by authority in the questions before us, let them sum up the real asserters of the Liberty of man, and they will find them not to be very numerous, but on the contrary,