A careful and strict enquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that freedom of…

II. Men in their first Use of such Phrases as these, Must, can't, can't help it, can't avoid it, necessary, unable, impossible, unavoidable, irresistible &c. use them to signify a Necessity of Constraint or Restraint, a natural Necessity or Impossibility; or some Necessity that the Will has nothing to do in; which ⟨p. 208⟩may be, whether Men will or no; and which may be supposed to be just the same, let Men's Inclinations and Desires be what they will. Such Kind of Terms in their original Use, I suppose among all Nations, are relative; carrying in their Signification (as was before observed) a Reference or Respect to some contrary Will, Desire or Endeavour, which, it is supposed, is, or may be in the Case. All Men find, and begin to find in early Childhood, that there are innumerable Things that can't be done, which they desire to do; and innumerable Things which they are averse to, that must be, they can't avoid them, they will be, whether they choose them or no. 'Tis to express this Necessity, which Men so soon and so often find, and which so greatly and so early affects them in innumerable Cases, that such Terms and Phrases are first formed; and 'tis to signify such a Necessity, that they are first used, and that they are most constantly used, in the common Affairs of Life; and not to signify any such metaphysical, speculative and abstract Notion, as that Connection in the Nature or Course of Things, which is between the Subject and Predicate of a Proposition, and which is the Foundation of the certain Truth of that Proposition; to signify which, they who employ themselves in Philosophical Inquiries into the first Origin and Metaphysical Relations and Dependences of Things, have borrowed these Terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our Cradles in a Use of such Terms and Phrases, entirely different from this, and carrying a Sense exceeding diverse from that in which they are commonly used in the Controversy between Arminians and Calvinists. And it being, as was said before, a Dictate of the universal Sense of Mankind, evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the Necessity signified by these Terms, in the Sense in which we first learn them, does excuse Persons, and free them from all Fault or Blame;

II. Men in their first Use of such Phrases as these, Must, can't, can't help it, can't avoid it, necessary, unable, impossible, unavoidable, irresistible &c. use them to signify a Necessity of Constraint or Restraint, a natural Necessity or Impossibility; or some Necessity that the Will has nothing to do in; which