SECT.  LXXXVII.  The Epicureans cast a Mist before their own Eyes by endeavouring to explain the Liberty of Man by the Declination of Atoms.

But let us consider to what degree those philosophers impose upon their own understandings.  What can they find in the clinamen that, with any colour, can account for the liberty of man?  This liberty is not imaginary; for it is not in our power to doubt of our free-will, any more than it is to doubt of what we are intimately conscious and certain.  I am conscious I am free to continue sitting when I rise in order to walk.  I am sensible of it with so entire certainty that it is not in my power ever to doubt of it in earnest; and I should be inconsistent with myself if I dared to say the contrary.  Can the proof of our religion be more evident and convincing?  We cannot doubt of the existence of God unless we doubt of our own liberty; from whence I infer that no man can seriously doubt of the being of the Deity, since no man can entertain a serious doubt about his own liberty.  If, on the contrary, it be frankly acknowledged that men are really free, nothing is more easy than to demonstrate that the liberty of man’s will cannot consist of any combination of atoms, if one supposes that there was no first mover, who gave matter arbitrary laws for its motion.  Motion must be essential to bodies, and all the laws of motion must also be as necessary as the essences of natures are.  Therefore, according to this system, all the motions of bodies must be performed by constant, necessary, and immutable laws; the motion in a straight line must be essential to all atoms, that are not made to deviate from it by the encounter of other atoms; the straight line must likewise be essential either upwards or downwards, either from right to left, or left to right, or some other diagonal way, fixed, precise, and immutable.  Besides, it is evident that no atom can make another atom deviate; for that other atom carries also in its essence the same invincible and eternal determination to follow the straight line the same way.  From hence it follows that all the atoms placed at first on different lines must pursue ad infinitum those parallel lines without ever coming nearer one another; and that those who are in the same line must follow one another ad infinitum without ever coming up together, but keeping still the same distance from one another.  The clinamen, as we have already shown, is manifestly impossible: but, contrary to evident truth, supposing it to be possible, in such a case it must be affirmed that the clinamen is no less necessary, immutable, and essential to atoms than the straight line.  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 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.  Thus which way so ever the Epicurean turns, he overthrows his system with his own hands.  But let us not, by any means, endeavour to confound men that err and mistake, since we are men as well as they, and no less subject to error.  Let us only pity them, study to light and inform them with patience, edify them, pray for them, and conclude with asserting an evident truth.