been proved that the murderer’s will to do a bad deed was the result of antecedents.  Acts have marks and consequences of their own, good or bad, whatever may be the state of mind of those who do them.  But Diderot does not seem to divine the true issue; he writes as if Necessarians or Determinists denied the existence of volitions, and as if the question were whether volitions do exist.  Nobody denies that they exist; the real question is of the conditions under which they exist.  Are they determined by antecedents, or are they self-determined, spontaneous, and unconnected?  Is Will independent of cause?

Diderot’s argumentation is, in fact, merely a protest that man is conscious of a Will.  And just as in other parts of his article Diderot by Liberty means only the existence of Will, so by Liberty he means only the healthy condition of the soul, and not its independence of causation.  We need not waste words on so dire a confusion, nor on the theory that Will is sometimes dependent on cerebral antecedents and sometimes not.  The curious thing is that the writer should not have perceived that he was himself in this preposterous theory propounding the very principle which he denounced as destructive to virtue, ruinous to society, and worthy of punishment by the government.  For it seems that, after all, the Will of those whose “dispositions are not moderate” is not free; and we may surely say that those whose dispositions are least moderate, are exactly the most violent malefactors against the common weal.  One more passage is worth quoting to show how little the writer had seized the true meaning of the debate.  “According to you,” he says to Bayle, “it is not clear that it is at the pure choice of my will to move my arm or not to move it:  if that be so, it is then necessarily determined that within a quarter of an hour from now I shall lift my hand three times together, or that I shall not.  Now, if you seriously pretend that I am not free, you cannot refuse an offer that I make you; I will wager a thousand pistoles to one that I will do, in the matter of moving my hand, exactly the opposite to what you back; and you may take your choice.  If you do think the wager fair, it can only be because of your necessary and invincible judgment that I am free.”  As if the will to move or not to move the arm would be uncaused and unaffected by antecedents, when you have just provided so strong an antecedent as the desire to save a thousand pistoles.  It was, perhaps, well enough for Voltaire to content himself with vague poetical material for his poetical discourse on Liberty, but from Diderot, whether as editor or as writer, something better might have been expected than a clumsy reproduction of the reasoning by which men like Turretini had turned philosophy into the corrupted handmaid of theology.