country, although they were unjust; notwithstanding the doors of his
gaol were left open to him he would not save himself; but in this he did
not act as a free agent; the invisible chains of opinion, the secret
love of decorum, the inward respect for the laws, even when they were
iniquitous, the fear of tarnishing his glory, kept him in his prison:
they were motives sufficiently powerful, with this enthusiast for
virtue, to induce him to wait death with tranquillity; it was not in his
power to save himself, because he could find no potential motive to
bring him to depart, even for an instant, from those principles to which
his mind was accustomed.

Man, says he, frequently acts against his inclination, from whence he
has falsely concluded he is a free agent; when he appears to act
contrary to his inclination, he is determined to it by some motive
sufficiently efficacious to vanquish this inclination. A sick man, with
a view to his cure, arrives at conquering his repugnance to the most
disgusting remedies: the fear of pain, the dread of death, then become
necessary and intelligent motives; consequently, this sick man cannot be
said, with truth, by any means, to act freely.

When it is said, that man is not a free agent, it is not pretended to
compare him to a body moved by a simple impulsive cause: he contains
within himself causes inherent to his existence; he is moved by an
interior organ, which has its own peculiar laws; which is itself
necessarily determined, in consequence of ideas formed from perceptions,
resulting from sensations, which it receives from exterior objects. As
the mechanism of these sensations, of these perceptions, and the manner
they engrave ideas on the brain of man, are not known to him, because he
is unable to unravel all these motions; because he cannot perceive the
chain of operations in his soul, or the motive-principle that acts