15. Volition.
Such is the difficulty of explaining and giving clear notions of internal actions by sounds, that I must
here warn my reader, that ordering, directing, choosing, preferring, etc., which I have made use of, will not
distinctly enough express volition, unless he will reflect on what he himself does when he wills. For example,
preferring, which seems perhaps best to express the act of volition, does it not precisely. For though a man would
prefer flying to walking, yet who can say he ever wills it? Volition, it is plain, is an act of the mind knowingly
exerting that dominion it takes itself to have over any part of the man, by employing it in, or withholding it from,
any particular action. And what is the will, but the faculty to do this? And is that faculty anything more in effect
than a power; the power of the mind to determine its thought, to the producing, continuing, or stopping any action,
as far as it depends on us? For can it be denied that whatever agent has a power to think on its own actions, and to
prefer their doing or omission either to other, has that faculty called will? Will, then, is nothing but such a power.
Liberty, on the other side, is the power a man has to do or forbear doing any particular action according as its
doing or forbearance has the actual preference in the mind; which is the same thing as to say, according as he
himself wills it.
