n, he made Munich capitulate on February
13th, 1742.

_LIBERTY_

Either I am very much mistaken, or Locke the definer has very well
defined liberty as "power." I am mistaken again, or Collins, celebrated
London magistrate, is the only philosopher who has really sifted this
idea, and Clark's answer to him was merely that of a theologian. But of
all that has been written in France on liberty, the following little
dialogue seems to me the most clear.

A: There is a battery of guns firing in your ears, have you the liberty
to hear them or not to hear them?

B: Without doubt, I cannot stop myself hearing them.

A: Do you want this gun to carry off your head and the heads of your
wife and daughter, who are walking with you?

B: What are you talking about? as long as I am of sound mind, I cannot
want such a thing; it is impossible.

A: Good; you hear this gun necessarily, and you wish necessarily that
neither you nor your family shall die from a cannon shot while you are
out for a walk; you have not the power either of not hearing or of
wishing to remain here?

B: Clearly.

A: You have consequently taken some thirty steps in order to be
sheltered from the gun, you have had the power to walk these few steps
with me?

B: Again very clearly.

A: And if you had been a paralytic, you could not have avoided being
exposed to this battery, you would necessarily have heard and received a
gun shot; and you would be dead necessarily?

B: Nothing is more true.

A: In what then does your liberty consist, unless it be in the power
that your self has exercised in performing what your will required of
absolute necessity?

B: You embarrass me; liberty then is nothing but the power of doing what
I want to do?

A: Think about it, and see if liberty can be understood otherwise.

B: In that case my hunting dog is as free as I am; he has necessarily
the will to run when he sees a hare, and the power of running if he has
not a pain in his legs. I have then nothing above my dog; you reduce me
to the state of the beasts.

A: What poor sophistry from the poor sophists who have taught you.
Indeed you are in a bad way to be free like your dog! Do you not eat,
sleep, propagate like him, even almost to the attitude? Do you want the
sense of smell other than through your nose? Why do you want to have
liberty otherwise than your dog has?

B: But I have a soul which reasons much, and my dog reasons hardly at
all. He has almos