is made between several possibles, and the will is
determined only by the preponderating goodness of the object. This is
therefore not a defect where God and the saints are concerned: on the
contrary, it would be a great defect, or rather a manifest absurdity, were
it otherwise, even in men here on earth, and if they were capable of acting
without any inclining reason. Of such absurdity no example will ever be
found; and even supposing one takes a certain course out of caprice, to
demonstrate one's freedom, the pleasure or advantage one thinks to find in
this conceit is one of the reasons tending towards it.

46. There is therefore a freedom of contingency or, in a way, of
indifference, provided that by 'indifference' is understood that nothing
necessitates us to one course or the other; but there is never any
_indifference of equipoise_, that is, where all is completely even on [149]
both sides, without any inclination towards either. Innumerable great and
small movements, internal and external, co-operate with us, for the most
part unperceived by us. And I have already said that when one leaves a room
there are such and such reasons determining us to put the one foot first,
without pausing to reflect. For there is not everywhere a slave, as in
Trimalchio's house in Petronius, to cry to us: the right foot first. All
that we have just said agrees entirely also with the maxims of the
philosophers, who teach that a cause cannot act without having a
disposition towards action. It is this disposition which contains a
predetermination, whether the doer have received it from without, or have
had it in consequence of his own antecedent character.

47. Thus we have no need to resort, in company with some new Thomists, to a
new immediate predetermination by God, such as may cause the free creature
to abandon his indifference, and to a decree of God for predetermining the
creature, making it possible for God to know what the creature will do: for
it suffices that the creature be predetermined by its preceding state,
which inclines it to one course more than to the other. Moreover, all these
connexions of the actions of the creature and of all creatures were
represented in the divine understanding, and known to God through the
knowledge of mere intelligence, before he had decreed to give them
existence. Thus we see that, in order to account for the foreknowledge of
God, one may dispense with both the mediate knowledge of the Molini