incontestible truth, and believed enlightened; it is the basis or
religion, which has been incapable of imagining how man could either
merit reward or deserve punishment if he was not a free agent. Society
has been believed interested in this system, because an idea has gone
abroad, that if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as
necessary, the right of punishing those who injure their associates
would no longer exist. At length human vanity accommodated itself to an
hypothesis which, unquestionable, appears to distinguish man from all
other physical beings, by assigning to him the special privilege of a
total independence of all other causes; but of which a very little
reflection would have shewn him the absurdity or even the impossibility.

As a part, subordinate to the great whole, man is obliged to experience
its influence. To be a free agent it were needful that each individual
was of greater strength than the entire of Nature; or, that he was out
of this Nature: who, always in action herself, obliges all the beings
she embraces, to act, and to concur to her general motion; or, as it has
been said elsewhere, to conserve her active existence, by the motion
that all beings produce in consequence of their particular energies,
which result from their being submitted to fixed, eternal, and immutable
laws. In order that man might be a free agent, it were needful that all
beings should lose their essences; it is equally necessary that he
himself should no longer enjoy physical sensibility; that he should
neither know good nor evil; pleasure nor pain; but if this was the case,
from that moment he would no longer be in a state to conserve himself,
or render his existence happy; all beings would become indifferent to
him; he would no longer have any choice; he would cease to know what he
ought to love; what it was right he should fear; he would not have any
acquaintance with that which he should seek after; or with that which it
is requisite he should avoid. In short, man would be an unnatural being;