We must have recourse to reflexion or to meditation in order to effect this discrimination.  Now I assert that one can never by purely philosophical meditations arrive at an established certainty that we are the efficient cause of our volitions:  for every person who makes due investigation will recognize clearly, that if we were only passive subjects with regard to will we should have the same sensations of experience as we have when we think that we are free.  Assume, for the sake of argument, that God so ordered the laws of the union between soul and body that all the modalities of the soul, without a single exception, are of necessity linked together with the interposition of the modalities of the brain.  You will then understand that nothing will happen to us except that of which we are conscious:  there will be in our soul the same sequence of thoughts from the perception of objects of the senses, which is its first step, up to the most definite volitions, which are its final step.  There will be in this sequence the consciousness of ideas, that of affirmations, that of irresolutions, that of velleities and that of volitions.  For whether the act of willing be impressed upon us by an external cause or we bring it about ourselves, it will be equally true that we will, and that we feel that we will.  Moreover, as this external cause can blend as much pleasure as it will with the volition which it impresses upon us, we shall be able to feel at times that the acts of our will please us infinitely, and that they lead us according to the bent of our strongest inclinations.  We shall feel no constraint; you know the maxim:  voluntas non potest cogi.  Do[309] you not clearly understand that a weather-vane, always having communicated to it simultaneously (in such a way, however, that priority of nature or, if one will, a real momentary priority, should attach to the desire for motion) movement towards a certain point on the horizon, and the wish to turn in that direction, would be persuaded that it moved of itself to fulfil the desires which it conceived?  I assume that it would not know that there were winds, or that an external cause changed everything simultaneously, both its situation and its desires.  That is the state we are in by our nature:  we know not whether an invisible cause makes us pass sufficiently from one thought to another.  It is therefore natural that men are persuaded that they determine their own acts.  But it remains to be discovered whether they are mistaken in that, as in countless other things they affirm by a kind of instinct and without having made use of philosophic meditation.  Since therefore there are two hypotheses as to what takes place in man:  the one that he is only a passive subject, the other that he has active virtues, one cannot in reason prefer the second to the first, so long as one can only adduce proofs of feeling.  For we should feel with an equal force that we wish this or that, whether all our volitions were imprinted upon our soul by an exterior and invisible cause, or we formed them ourselves.’