 Boeker (2019) maintains that what Shaftesbury is interested in is positive freedom, or self-mastery. On this view, a person is free when she acts from her highest and most reasonable principles, rather than her lower appetites and passions. Many parts of Characteristicks do seem to involve this idea of a person’s comprising two competing parts. These includes the story of Hercules choosing virtue over pleasure (C 3.347–392), the story of two brothers battling for a football (C 1.187), the self-dialogue of Soliloquy (C, 1.156-59), and the story of a nobleman who faces loss of control to sexual desire (C 1.176–88). All these stories make the point that to be free is for one’s higher part to win out over one’s lower part (see also Crisp 2019, 75–76).