Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

198 Augustinian
Doctrine CHA?. vm.
tion at all necessarily involve the particular expression,
freedom of the will, which Locke first impugns in his argu
ment, though they use it as a convenient mode of stating
the real truth for which they contend, Locke, however,
first examines this expression, and starts the question in
this particular form, whether the will is free ;
and he de
cides against its freedom on the ground that freedom is a
power and the will a power, and that a power cannot be
predicated of a power, power being the attribute of an
:^agent. Freedom, he says, is the power to act as we will.
So far as a man has power to think or not to think, to
move or not to move, according to the preference or direc
tion of his own mind, so far is a man free The
idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or
forbear any particular action, according to the determina
tion or thought of his mind. *
Freedom, then, being the
power to act as we will, assert this power of the will, he
says, and what does it become ? the power of the will to
act as it wills ; i.e. for this is the only act the will can do,
the power of the will to will as it wills. But this is a
power which is contained in the very act of willing, and
does not go at all beyond the mere fact of will. So that,
he argues, when we would attribute this i. power e. free
dom to the will, we find immediately that we are making
no assertion beyond that of the will itself, not advancing
a step farther, but going on like a rocking horse upon the
same ground. Though in a certain incorrect way he allows
this freedom to be asserted of the will, because its exertion
is thus ipso facto freedom. If freedom can with any
propriety of speech be applied to power, it may be attri
buted to the power that is in man to produce or forbear
producing, by choice or preference, which is that which
denominates him free, and is freedom itself. But if any
one should ask whether freedom were free, he would be
suspected not to understand well what he said ; and he
should be thought to deserve Midas ears, who, knowing
that rich was a denomination for the possession of riches,
should demand whether riches themselves were rich. *
1
Essay, book 2. c. 21. 2
Essay, book 2, c. 21.