A dialogue with Locke on freedom of the will : Hume, An Essay concerning Human Understanding

Locke: ‘so far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preferences or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free’.

Hume: “but how does the mind prefer thinking of a thing to not thinking of it? How does the mind direct movement rather than the rest? Does it prefer or direct in such a way as that it could not possibly prefer or direct otherwise?’ – to this question, ‘determinists answer yes, and libertarians no’.
‘A clock is in no way a free agent. Yet a clock might be called free when it has to power to move or not to move, according to the preference and direction of its own workings’.
‘Is not this point in dispute, whether our minds are wound up like clocks, to prefer and direct us to certain motions, or whether they have a command over themselves, placed in themselves alone, which machines have not?’

Locke: “Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power; wherever doing or not doing will not follow equally upon the preferences of his mind directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary…suppose a man were to be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room, where is a person he longs to see and speak with, and be there locked fast in, beyond his power to get out; he awakes and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in, i.e., prefers to stay to going away. i ask, is this not voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it; and yet, being locked fast in, ‘tis evident he is not at liberty not to stay; he has not freedom to be gone.”

Hume: “It is not so much the action as the act that is wrong. The mental act by which he approves of the marking is an approval which me might have withheld, which he freely bestows, and for which god holds him culpable.
‘Voluntary, because he wills what he does; free, because he need not have willed it; and guilty because he freely wills to do a fraudulent thing’.

Locke: “The question itself is alltogether improper, and it is as insignificant to ask whether a man’s will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtues square; liberty being as little applicable to the will as swiftness of motion is to sleep, or squareness to virtue…and when anyone considers it, I think he will plainly perceive that 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…[will is nothing but a power to desire to do something else]…liberty on the other hand, is the power a man has to do or forebare doing any particular action…according as he himself wills.”

Hume: “Locke’s argument is shallow. it is something like this
– will is power of choosing
– liberty is power of acting according to choice
which leads to ‘the will is free’ and ‘the power of choosing has the power of acting according to choice’, this is absurd as one power cannot have another power, so the proposition ‘the will is free’ is absurd and meaningless.
Locke wants to attribute meaning to ‘the will is free’ again. So he says:
‘will is power of consciously rejecting evil and choosing good.
‘Freedom is the not being under constraint to reject any but sheer evil, or choose any but sheer good’.
This apparantly shows that the will is free.
‘Free will is a power, the same power as the will, as St Thomas shows, but the liberty or free act of the will is not a power but an example of a power.”