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 never hook one another, because they never meet. But,
however, after having supposed that two crooked atoms unite by
hooking one another, the Epicurean must be forced to own that the
thinking being, which is free in his operations, and which
consequently is not a collection of atoms, ever moved by necessary
laws, is incorporeal, and could not by its figure be hooked with the
body it animates.
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