nd to find the solution of the difficulties
surrounding it. I confess to you quite simply that I still cannot properly
fathom it. That does not discourage me; I suppose, as other philosophers in
other cases have supposed, that time will unfold the meaning of this noble
paradox. I wish that Father Malebranche had thought fit to defend it, but
he took other measures.' Is it possible that the enjoyment of doubt can
have such influence upon a gifted man as to make him wish and hope for the
power to believe that two contradictories never exist together for the sole
reason that God forbade them to, and, moreover, that God could have issued
them an order to ensure that they always walked together? There is indeed a
noble paradox! Father Malebranche showed great wisdom in taking other
measures.

186. I cannot even imagine that M. Descartes can have been quite seriously
of this opinion, although he had adherents who found this easy to believe,
and would in all simplicity follow him where he only made pretence to go.
It was apparently one of his tricks, one of his philosophic feints: he
prepared for himself some loophole, as when for instance he discovered a
trick for denying the movement of the earth, while he was a Copernican in
the strictest sense. I suspect that he had in mind here another
extraordinary manner of speaking, of his own invention, which was to say
that affirmations and negations, and acts of inner judgement in general,
are operations of the will. Through this artifice the eternal verities,
which until the time of Descartes had been named an object of the divine
understanding, suddenly became an object of God's will. Now the acts of his
will are free, therefore God is the free cause of the verities. That [245]
is the outcome of the matter. _Spectatum admissi._ A slight change in the
meaning of terms has caused all this commotion. But if the affirmations of
necessary truths were actions of the will of the most perfect mind, these
actions would be anything but free, for there is nothing to choose. It
seems that M. Descartes did not declare himself sufficiently on the nature
of freedom, and that his conception of it was somewhat unusual: for he
extended it so far that he even held the affirmations of necessary truths
to be free in God. That was preserving only the name of freedom.

187. M. Bayle, who with others conceives this to be a freedom of
indifference, that God had had to establish (for instance) the truths o