For instance, we cannot say a word without remembering that we have done so.
Again, it is not within the free power of the mind to remember or forget a thing at will.

Therefore the freedom of the mind must in any case be limited to the power of uttering or not uttering something which it remembers.

But when we dream that we speak, we believe that we speak from a free decision of the mind, yet we do not speak, or, if we do, it is by a spontaneous motion of the body.

Again, we dream that we are concealing something, and we seem to act from the same decision of the mind as that, whereby we keep silence when awake concerning something we know.

Lastly, we dream that from the free decision of our mind we do something, which we should not dare to do when awake.
Now I should like to know whether there be in the mind two sorts of decisions, one sort illusive, and the other sort free?
If our folly does not carry us so far as this, we must necessarily admit, that the decision of the mind, which is believed to be free, is not distinguishable from the imagination or memory, and is nothing more than the affirmation, which an idea, by virtue of being an idea, necessarily involves (II.
xlix.).