It is true that when God causes a volition in us he causes a free action.  But it seems to me that the question here is not of the universal cause or of that production of our will which is proper to it in so far as it is a created effect, whose positive elements are actually created continually through God’s co-operation, like all other absolute reality of things.  We are concerned here with the reasons for willing, and the means God uses when he gives us a good will or permits us to have an evil will.  It is always we who produce it, good or evil, for it is our action:  but there are always reasons that make us act, without impairing either our spontaneity or our freedom.  Grace does no more than give impressions which are conducive to making will operate through fitting motives, such as would be an attention, a dic cur hic, a prevenient pleasure.  And it is quite evident that that does not interfere with freedom, any more than could a friend who gives counsel and furnishes motives.  Thus Herr Wittich has not supplied an answer to the question, any more than M. Bayle, and recourse to God is of no avail here.

299.  But let me give another much more reasonable passage from the same M. Bayle, where he disputes with greater force the so-called lively sense of freedom, which according to the Cartesians is a proof of freedom.  His words are indeed full of wit, and worthy of consideration, and occur in the Reply to the Questions of a Provincial (vol.  III, ch. 140, p. 761 seqq.).  Here they are:  ’By the clear and distinct sense we have of our existence we do not discern whether we exist through ourselves or derive our being from another.  We discern that only by reflexion, that is, through meditation upon our powerlessness in the matter of conserving ourselves as much as we would, and of freeing ourselves from dependence upon the beings that surround us, etc.  It is indeed certain that the pagans (the same must be said of the Socinians, since they deny the creation) never attained[308] to the knowledge of that true dogma that we were created from nothing, and that we are derived from nothingness at every moment of our continuance.  They therefore thought erroneously that all substances in the universe exist of themselves and can never be reduced to nothing, and that thus they depend upon no other thing save in respect of their modifications, which are liable to be destroyed by the action of an external cause.  Does not this error spring from the fact that we are unconscious of the creative action which conserves us, and that we are only conscious of our existence?  That we are conscious of it, I say, in such a way that we should for ever remain ignorant of the cause of our being if other knowledge did not aid us?  Let us say also, that the clear and distinct sense we have of the acts of our will cannot make us discern whether we give them ourselves to ourselves or receive them from that same cause which gives us existence.