employment before him, but he is idle: has he power to work? Another has sufficient money to satisfy his creditors, but he is fond of gaming, and has no disposition to meet them: has he power to pay his debts? A rich man is importuned by a sufferer, but he is covetous: has he power to relieve the distress? In all these cases we conceive an affirmative answer would be immediately returned; yet they are cases in which disposition is wanting; and they lead to the conclusion, therefore, that disposition is not necessary to power.

Or conceive it to be granted, for the sake of argument, that disposition is essential to power. Then it will follow that, what a man is not disposed to do, he has no power to do. Though a man be rolling in wealth, a love of dissipation destroys his power to pay his debts; and though he be in full vigour, idleness annihilates his power to work; and it is only necessary to go great lengths in these bad dispositions, to authorize one to say, I am totally unable either to pay your bills, or to labour for my bread. A person who should use such language as this would be deemed a fit inmate for a lunatic asylum. Nothing is more common, and few things are more important, than the distinction

between power and inclination. You can but you will not, is language almost incessantly used, and the distinction on which it is founded is the basis of some very important transactions; as when an idle fellow is sent to the treadmill, or an able but reluctant debtor to the prison.

To say that disposition is essential to power, attaches a very extraordinary limitation to the idea of power itself. I have no power, I am told, to do any thing that I am disposed not to do, yet there are an immense number of things which I am disposed not to do, which I have been always used to think I could do. As, for instance, I am surrounded by several hundred places, and am disposed not to go to any of them; but have I therefore no power to go to any of them? In that case I must be considered as fixed, literally like a rock, to my position, till I am disposed to move, with which disposition to move, it appears, my power of moving is identical. On the contrary, the obvious fact is, that we have power to do many things, whether we are disposed to do them or not. The things are but few in comparison which we are disposed to do, and these are selected at our pleasure out of the much larger number

which we have power to perform. The state of the disposition has not the slightest connexion with the question of power.

It cannot but seem strange that such an idea as we have been noticing should ever have been entertained; but it has apparently arisen from an erroneous view of the fact that a disposition to act is necessary to the actual performance of an action, whence it has been hastily concluded to be necessary also to the power of performing it. Nothing certainly can be more obvious than that a voluntary being will never act further than he feels a disposition to do so. Though I may take a journey whenever I please, so long as I am determined not to do so, it is quite certain that I shall not; yet one would think it equally plain, that my power of doing it remains unimpaired. To imagine that whatever is necessary to the actual performance of any thing is also necessary to the power of performing it, is to overlook the difference that exists between power and performance, which, being different in themselves, do not necessarily imply the same requisites. The mistake has sometimes been confirmed by not properly interpreting a form of speech which is frequently employed

in this connexion. We say of a man desperately idle, he cannot work; or of another devoted to drinking, he cannot refrain; or, a man cannot do one thing while he is determined to do the contrary; and then we conclude that what we say a man cannot do he really has not power to do. Into the full force of this language we shall inquire in a subsequent chapter; at present it may be sufficient to observe that it is very commonly employed, as it is obviously in these cases, to express willingness or unwillingness, without any reference to power at all.

There are clearly two very distinct states before us; namely, the possession of means to perform a given action, with a disposition to employ them; and the possession of the same means for the same action, without a disposition to employ them. The question is, which of these two states are we to call power? In all ordinary cases the latter is called power; and we are willing to adopt this nomenclature rigidly through the whole discussion. If any person should insist on giving the name power only to the former of these states, doubtless he would evade the following argument; but he would also neednessly depart from the common,

and therefore the only intelligible use of the term; while he would leave the latter very important state altogether without a name, and merely necessitate the construction of a new one, before he individually could be pursued through the perverse intricacies of his

course.

We are quite ready to admit the fact, that a disposition towards an action seems to render the doing of it easy, and that a contrary disposition seems to render it difficult, sometimes even to impossibility. But it only seems to do so. By the terms easy and difficult, strictly considered, we understand only that actions are more or less welcome or pleasing to us, as must inevitably be the case, in proportion as we are willing or unwilling to perform them. It is manifest, however, that our power to perform an action is not at all affected by its being more or less agreeable to us. We are fully able to do some things which, nevertheless, we deeply abhor, and quite unable to do other things, the accomplishment of which would give us great delight; so that, after all, though aversion may prevent action, it has no tendency to diminish power. However loath I may be to satisfy my creditors, even