A: And if you had been a paralytic, you could not have avoided being exposed to this battery, you would necessarily have heard and received a gun shot; and you would be dead necessarily?
B: Nothing is more true.
A: In what then does your liberty consist, unless it be in the power that your self has exercised in performing what your will required of absolute necessity?
B: You embarrass me; liberty then is nothing but the power of doing what I want to do?
A: Think about it, and see if liberty can be understood otherwise.
B: In that case my hunting dog is as free as I am; he has necessarily the will to run when he sees a hare, and the power of running if he has not a pain in his legs. I have then nothing above my dog; you reduce me to the state of the beasts.
A: What poor sophistry from the poor sophists who have taught you. Indeed you are in a bad way to be free like your dog! Do you not eat, sleep, propagate like him, even almost to the attitude? Do you want the sense of smell other than through your nose? Why do you want to have liberty otherwise than your dog has?
B: But I have a soul which reasons much, and my dog reasons hardly at all. He has almost only simple ideas, and I have a thousand metaphysical ideas.
A: Well, you are a thousand times freer than he is; that is, you have a thousand times more power of thinking than he has; but you do not think otherwise than he does.
B: What! I am not free to wish what I wish?