ovalis."

"The solitary thinker whom Malebranche called a wretch, Schleiermacher
reveres and invokes as equal to a saint. That 'systematic atheist,' on
whom Bayle lavished outrage, has been for modern Germany the most
religious of men. 'God-intoxicated,' as Novalis said, 'he has seen the
world through a thick cloud, and man has been to his troubled eyes only a
fugitive mode of Being in itself.' In that system, in fine, so shocking
and so monstrous, that 'hideous chimera,' Jacobi sees the last word of
philosophy, Schelling the presentiment of the true philosophy."

Section IV.

The views of Locke, Tucker, Hartley, Priestley, Helvetius, and Diderot,
with respect to the relation between liberty and necessity.

Locke, it is well known, adopted the notions of free-agency given by
Hobbes. "In this," says he, "consists freedom, viz., in our being able to
act or not to act, according as we shall choose or will."(17) And this
notion of liberty, consisting in a freedom from external co-action, has
received an impetus and currency from the influence of Locke which it
would not otherwise have obtained. Neither Calvin nor Luther, as we have
seen, pretended to hold it up as the freedom of the will. This was
reserved for Hobbes and his immortal follower, John Locke, who has, in his
turn, been copied by a host of illustrious disciples who would have
recoiled from the more articulate and consistent development of this
doctrine by the philosopher of Malmsbury. It is only because Locke has
enveloped it in a cloud of inconsistencies that it has been able to secure
the veneration of the great and good.

It is remarkable, that although Locke adopted the definition of free-will
given by Hobbes, and which the latter so easily reconciled with the
omnipotence and omniscience of God; yet he expressly declares that he had
found it impossible to reconcile those attributes in the Divine Being with
the free-agency of man. Surely no such difficulty could have existed, if
his definition of free-agency, or free-will, be correct; for although
omnipotence itself might produce our volitions, we might still be free to
act, to move in accordance with our volitions. But the truth is, there was
something more in Locke's thoughts and feelings, in the inmost working of
his nature, with respect to moral liberty, than there was in his
definition. The inconsistency and fluctuation of his views on this
all-important subject