Quotes from Essay Concerning Human Understanding

By John Locke (1690)

• Voluntary, then, is not opposed to necessary, but to involuntary. For a man may prefer what he can do, to what he cannot do; the state he is in, to its absence or change; though necessity has made it in itself unalterable.#
  Free Will
• It is as insignificant to ask whether man’s will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square . . . Liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power.#
  Free Will
• If it be reasonable to suppose and talk of faculties as distinct beings that can act (as we do, when we say the will orders, and the will is free), it is fit that we should make a speaking faculty, and a walking faculty, and a dancing faculty, by which these actions are produced, which are but several modes of motion; as well as we make the will and understanding to be faculties, by which the actions of choosing and perceiving are produced, which are but several modes of thinking.#
  Free Will
• The question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free.#
  Free Will