of the mind. Calvin truly says, that to call
this external freedom from co-action or natural necessity a freedom of the
will, is to decorate a most diminutive thing with a superb title; but the
philosopher of Malmsbury, and his ingenious disciple, seem disposed to
confer the high-sounding title and empty name on us, in order to reconcile
us to the servitude and chains in which they have been pleased to bind us.

This idea of liberty, common to Hobbes and Collins, which Mackintosh says
was familiar to Luther and Calvin at least a hundred and thirty years
before, is in reality of much earlier origin. It was maintained by the
ancient Stoics, by whom it is as clearly set forth as by Hobbes himself.
The well-known illustration of the Stoic Chrysippus, so often mentioned by
Leibnitz and others, is a proof of the correctness of this remark:
"Suppose I push against a heavy body," says he: "if it be square, it will
not move; if it be cylindrical, it will. What the difference of form is to
the stone, the difference of disposition is to the mind." Thus his notion
of freedom was derived from matter, and supposed to consist in the absence
of friction! The idea of liberty thus deduced from that which is purely
and perfectly passive, from an absolutely necessitated state of body, was
easily reconciled by him with his doctrine of fate.

Is it not strange that Mr. Hazlitt, after adopting this definition of
liberty, should have supposed that he allowed a real freedom to the will?
"I prefer exceedingly," says he, "to the modern instances of a couple of
billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysippus." We
cannot very well see, how the instance of a cylinder is so great an
improvement on that of a billiard-ball; especially as a sphere, and not a
cylinder, is free to move in all directions.

The truth is, we must quit the region of dead, inert, passive matter, if
we would form an idea of the true meaning of the term liberty, as applied
to the activity of living agents. Mr. Hazlitt evidently loses himself amid
the ambiguities of language, when he says, that "I so far agree with
Hobbes and differ from Locke, in thinking that liberty, in the most
extended and abstracted sense, is applicable to _material as well as
voluntary agents_." Still this very acute writer makes a few feeble and
ineffectual efforts to raise our notion of the liberty of moral agents
above that given by the illustration of Chrysippus in Cicero. "My notio