MIND AND SOUL The diVerence between animals and humans here is simply that when a man imagines a thing, he goes on to wonder what he can with it But this is a matter of will, not intellect Not that the will is a faculty peculiar to humans: a will is simply a desire, the desire that comes last at the end of a train of deliberation, and ‘beasts that have deliberation must necessarily also have will’ Human and animal desires are alike consequences of mechanical forces The diVerence is simply that humans have a wider repertoire of wants, in the service of which they employ their imaginations The freedom of the will is no greater in humans than in animals This thesis caused great oVence, and led to a celebrated debate with John Bramhall, a royalist Bishop of Derry who had shared Hobbes’ exile.3 Hobbes insisted, ‘Such a liberty as is free from necessity is not to be found in the will either of men or of beasts.’ He claimed, however, that liberty and necessity were not necessarily incompatible: Liberty and Necessity are Consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the Channel; so likewise in the Actions which men voluntarily do; which, because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man’s will, and every desire and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continuall chaine, whose Wrst link is in the hand of God, Wrst of all causes, they proceeed from necessity (L, 140) ‘This is a brutish liberty,’ Bramhall objected, ‘such a liberty as a bird hath to Xy when her wings are clipped Is not this a ridiculous liberty?’ Hobbes replied that a man was free to follow his will, but was not free to will The will to write, for instance, or the will to forbear from writing, did not come upon a person as a result of some previous will ‘He that cannot understand the diVerence between free to it if he will and free to will is not Wt’, Hobbes snorted, ‘to hear this controversy disputed, much less to be a writer in it.’ Hobbes’ account of liberty gives him a claim to be the founder of the doctrine called ‘compatibilism’, the thesis that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other He presents it in a crude form which, as Bramhall pointed out, fails to justice to the obvious diVerences between the modes of action of inanimate agents and of rational agents like human beings His version depends on a linear model of causation as a series of Published in 1663 as The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, from which the following quotations are taken 220