equired of a human creature in
the possession of liberty of action. It includes in its proper sense the
conception of the empire of will, the notion that mind is an arbiter,
that it sits on its throne, and decides, as an absolute prince, this way
or that.

Duty is the performance of what is due, the discharge of a debt
(debitum). But a knife owes nothing, and can in no sense be said to be
held to one sort of application rather than another; the debt can only
belong to a human being in possession of his liberty, by whom the knife
may be applied laudably or otherwise.

A multitude of terms instantly occur to us, the application of which
is limited in the same manner as the term duty is limited: such are, to
owe, obligation, debt, bond, right, claim, sin, crime, guilt, merit and
desert. Even reward and punishment, however they may be intelligible
when used merely in the sense of motives employed, have in general
acceptation a sense peculiarly derived from the supposed freedom of the
human will.

The mode therefore in which the advocates of the doctrine of necessity
have universally talked and written, is one of the most memorable
examples of the hallucination of the human intellect. They have at
all times recommended that we should translate the phrases in which
we usually express ourselves on the hypothesis of liberty, into the
phraseology of necessity, that we should talk no other language than
that which is in correspondence with the severest philosophy, and that
we should exert ourselves to expel all fallacious notions and delusions
so much as from our recollection. They did not perceive what a wide
devastation and destruction they were proposing of all the terms and
phrases that are in use in the communications between man and man
in actual life.--They might as well have recommended that we should
rigorously bear in mind on the ordinary occasions of life, that there is
no such thing as colour, that which we ordinary call by that name having
no existence in external objects, but belonging only to our way of
perceiving them.

The language which is suggested to us by the conception of the freedom
of human actions, moulds the very first articulations of a child,
"I will," and "I will not;" and is even distinctly conveyed by his
gestures, before he arrives at the power of articulation. This is the
explanation and key to his vehement and ungovernable movements, and his
rebellion. The petulance of the stripling, the fer