45.  We must therefore not imagine with some Schoolmen, whose ideas tend towards the chimerical, that free contingent futurities have the privilege of exemption from this general rule of the nature of things.  There is always a prevailing reason which prompts the will to its choice, and for the maintenance of freedom for the will it suffices that this reason should incline without necessitating.  That is also the opinion of all the ancients, of Plato, of Aristotle, of St. Augustine.  The will is never prompted to action save by the representation of the good, which prevails over the opposite representations.  This is admitted even in relation to God, the good angels and the souls in bliss:  and it is acknowledged that they are none the less free in consequence of that.  God fails not to choose the best, but he is not constrained so to do:  nay, more, there is no necessity in the object of God’s choice, for another sequence of things is equally possible.  For that very reason the choice is free and independent of necessity, because it 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.