Such is the difficulty of explaining and giving clear notions of internal actions by sounds, that I must here warn my reader, that ordering, directing, choosing, preferring, &c. which I have made use of, will not distinctly enough express volition, unless he will reflect on what he himself does when he wills.  For example, preferring, which seems perhaps best to express the act of volition, does it not precisely.  For though a man would prefer flying to walking, yet who can say he ever wills it?  Volition, it is plain, is an act of the mind knowingly exerting that dominion it takes itself to have over any part of the man, by employing it in, or withholding it from, any particular action.  And what is the will, but the faculty to do this?  And is that faculty anything more in effect than a power; the power of the mind to determine its thought, to the producing, continuing, or stopping any action, as far as it depends on us?  For can it be denied that whatever agent has a power to think on its own actions, and to prefer their doing or omission either to other, has that faculty called will?  Will, then, is nothing but such a power.  Liberty, on the other side, is the power a man has to do or forbear doing any particular action according as its doing or forbearance has the actual preference in the mind; which is the same thing as to say, according as he himself wills it.

16.  Powers belonging to Agents.

It is plain then that the will is nothing but one power or ability, and freedom another power or ability so that, to ask, whether the will has freedom, is to ask whether one power has another power, one ability another ability; a question at first sight too grossly absurd to make a dispute, or need an answer.  For, who is it that sees not that powers belong only to agents, and are attributes only of substances, and not of powers themselves?  So that this way of putting the question (viz. whether the will be free) is in effect to ask, whether the will be a substance, an agent, or at least to suppose it, since freedom can properly be attributed to nothing else.  If freedom can with any propriety of speech be applied to power, it may be attributed to the power that is in a man to produce, or forbear producing, motion in parts of his body, by choice or preference; which is that which denominates him free, and is freedom itself.  But if any one should ask, whether freedom were free, he would be suspected not to understand well what he said; and he would be thought to deserve Midas’s ears, who, knowing that rich was a denomination for the possession of riches, should demand whether riches themselves were rich.

17.  How the will instead of the man is called free.