able to foresee this event in the idea of the possible world that he resolved to create.  But the idea which they have of God is unworthy of the Author of things, and is not commensurate with the skill and wit which the writers of this party often display in certain particular discussions.  The author of the Reflexion on the Picture of Socinianism was not altogether mistaken in saying that the God of the Socinians would be ignorant and powerless, like the God of Epicurus, every day confounded by events and living from one day to the next, if he only knows by conjecture what the will of men is to be.

365.  The whole difficulty here has therefore only come from a wrong idea of contingency and of freedom, which was thought to have need of a complete indifference or equipoise, an imaginary thing, of which neither a notion nor an example exists, nor ever can exist.  Apparently M. Descartes had been imbued with the idea in his youth, at the College of la Fleche.  That caused him to say (part I of his Principles, art. 41):  ’Our thought is finite, and the knowledge and omnipotence of God, whereby he has not only known from all eternity everything that is, or that can be, but also has willed it, is infinite.  Thus we have enough intelligence to recognize clearly and distinctly that this power and this knowledge are in God; but we have not enough so to comprehend their extent that we can know how they leave the actions of men entirely free and indeterminate.’  The continuation has already been quoted above.  ‘Entirely free’, that is right; but one spoils everything by adding ‘entirely indeterminate’.  One has no need of infinite knowledge in order to see that the foreknowledge and the providence of God allow freedom to our actions, since God has foreseen those actions in [344] his ideas, just as they are, that is, free.  Laurentius Valla indeed, in his Dialogue against Boethius (which I will presently quote in epitome) ably undertakes to reconcile freedom with foreknowledge, but does not venture to hope that he can reconcile it with providence.  Yet there is no more difficulty in the one than the other, because the decree to give existence to this action no more changes its nature than does one’s mere consciousness thereof.  But there is no knowledge, however infinite it be, which can reconcile the knowledge and providence of God with actions of an indeterminate cause, that is to say, with a chimerical and impossible being.  The actions of the will are determined in two ways, by the foreknowledge or providence of God, and also by the dispositions of the particular immediate cause, which lie in the inclinations of the soul.  M. Descartes followed the Thomists on this point; but he wrote with his usual circumspection, so as not to come into conflict with some other theologians.