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 of numbers, and to ordain that three times three made nine, whereas he could have commanded them to make ten, imagines in this strange opinion, supposing it were possible to defend it, some kind of advantage gained against the Stratonists.  Strato was one of the leaders of the School of Aristotle, and the successor of Theophrastus; he maintained (according to Cicero’s account) that this world had been formed such as it is by Nature or by a necessary cause devoid of cognition.  I admit that that might be so, if God had so preformed matter as to cause such an effect by the laws of motion alone.  But without God there would not even have been any reason for existence, and still less for any particular existence of things:  thus Strato’s system is not to be feared.

188.  Nevertheless M. Bayle is in difficulties over this:  he will not admit plastic natures devoid of cognition, which Mr. Cudworth and others had introduced, for fear that the modern Stratonists, that is, the Spinozists, take advantage of it.  This has involved him in disputes with M. le Clerc.  Under the influence of this error, that a non-intelligent cause can produce nothing where contrivance appears, he is far from conceding to me that preformation which produces naturally the organs of animals, and the system of a harmony pre-established by God