it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is
the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by
other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary
actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are
necessitated." This is clear and explicit. There is no controversy, he
truly says, that voluntary actions, that is, external actions proceeding
from the will, are necessitated by the will. And as according to his
postulate, the will or volition is also caused by other things of which it
has no disposal, so they are also necessitated. In other words, external
voluntary actions are necessarily caused by volitions, and volitions are
necessarily caused by something else other than the will; and consequently
the chain is complete between the cause of volition and its effects. How,
then, is man a free-agent? and how is he accountable for his actions?
Hobbes has not left these questions unanswered; and it is a mistake to
suppose, as is too often done, that his argument in favour of necessity
evinces a design to sap the foundations of human responsibility.

He answers these questions precisely as they were answered by Luther and
Calvin more than a hundred years before his time. In order to solve this
great difficulty, and establish an agreement between necessity and
liberty, he insists on the distinction between co-action and necessity.
Sir James Mackintosh says, that "in his treatise _de Servo Arbitrio_
against Erasmus, Luther states the distinction between co-action and
necessity as familiar a hundred and fifty years before it was proposed by
Hobbes, or condemned in the Jansenists."(10) According to his definition
of liberty, it is merely a freedom from co-action, or external compulsion.
"I conceive liberty," says he, "to be rightly defined in this manner:
Liberty is the absence of all the impediments to action that are not
contained in the nature and intrinsical qualities of the agent: as for
example, the water is said to descend freely, or to have liberty to
descend by the channel of the river, because there is no impediment that
way; but not across, because the banks are impediments; and though the
water cannot ascend, yet men never say it wants liberty to ascend, but the
faculty or power, because the impediment is in the nature of the water and
intrinsical." According to this definition, though a man's volitions were
thrown out, not by himself, but by some irr