e. Now, will anybody say that an essential and
immutable law of the local motion of atoms explains and accounts for
the true liberty of man? Is it not manifest that the clinamen can
no more account for it than the straight line itself? The clinamen,
supposing it to be true, would be as necessary as the perpendicular
line, by which a stone falls from the top of a tower into the
street. Is that stone free in its fall? However, the will of man,
according to the principle of the clinamen, has no more freedom than
that stone. Is it possible for man to be so extravagant as to dare
to contradict his own conscience about his free-will, lest he should
be forced to acknowledge his God and maker? To affirm, on the one
hand, that the liberty of man is imaginary, we must silence the
voice and stifle the sense of all nature; give ourselves the lie in
the grossest manner; deny what we are most intimately conscious and
certain of; and, in short, be reduced to believe that we have no
eligibility or choice of two courses, or things proposed, about
which we fairly deliberate upon any occasion. Nothing does religion
more honour than to see men necessitated to fall into such gross and
monstrous extravagance as soon as they call in question the truths
she teaches. On the other hand, if we own that man is truly free,
we acknowledge in him a principle that never can be seriously
accounted for, either by the combinations of atoms or the laws of
local motion, which must be supposed to be all equally necessary and
essential to matter, if one denies a first mover. We must therefore
go out of the whole compass of matter, and search far from combined
atoms some incorporeal principle to account for free-will, if we
admit it fairly. Whatever is matter and an atom, moves only by
necessary, immutable, and invincible laws: wherefore liberty cannot
be found either in bodies, or in any local motion; and so we must
look for it in some incorporeal being. Now whose hand tied and
subjected to the organs of this corporeal machine that incorporeal
being which must necessarily be in me united to my body? Where is
the artificer that ties and unites natures so vastly different? Can
any but a power superior both to bodies and spirits keep them
together in this union with so absolute a sway? Two crooked atoms,
says an Epicurean, hook one another. Now this is false, according
to his very system; for I have demonstrated that those two crooked
atoms nev