306.  M. Bayle goes on:  ’There are at the very least two ways whereby man can extricate himself from the snares of equipoise.  One, which I have already mentioned, is for a man to flatter himself with the pleasing fancy that he is master in his own house, and that he does not depend upon objects.’  This way is blocked:  for all that one might wish to play master in one’s own house, that has no determining effect, nor does it favour one course more than the other.  M. Bayle goes on:  ’He would make this Act:  I will prefer this to that, because it pleases me to behave thus.’  But [312] these words, ‘because it pleases me’, ‘because such is my pleasure’, imply already a leaning towards ‘the object that pleases’.

307.  There is therefore no justification for continuing thus:  ’And so that which determined him would not be taken from the object; the motive would be derived only from the ideas men have of their own perfections, or of their natural faculties.  The other way is that of the lot or chance:  the short straw would decide.’  This way has an outlet, but it does not reach the goal:  it would alter the issue, for in such a case it is not man who decides.  Or again if one maintains that it is still the man who decides by lot, man himself is no longer in equipoise, because the lot is not, and the man has attached himself to it.  There are always reasons in Nature which cause that which happens by chance or through the lot.  I am somewhat surprised that a mind so shrewd as M. Bayle’s could have allowed itself to be so misled on this point.  I have set out elsewhere the true rejoinder to the Buridan sophism:  it is that the case of perfect equipoise is impossible, since the universe can never be halved, so as to make all impressions equivalent on both sides.

308.  Let us see what M. Bayle himself says elsewhere against the chimerical or absolutely undefined indifference.  Cicero had said (in his book De Fato) that Carneades had found something more subtle than the deviation of atoms, attributing the cause of a so-called absolutely undefined indifference to the voluntary motions of souls, because these motions have no need of an external cause, coming as they do from our nature.  But M. Bayle (Dictionary, art.  ‘Epicurus’, p. 1143) aptly replies that all that which springs from the nature of a thing is determined:  thus determination always remains, and Carneades’ evasion is of no avail.

309.  He shows elsewhere (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, ch. 90, l. 2, p. 229) ’that a freedom far removed from this so-called equipoise is incomparably more beneficial.  I mean’, he says, ’a freedom such as may always follow the judgements of the mind, and such as cannot resist objects clearly recognized as good.  I know of no people who do not agree that truth clearly recognized necessitates’ (determines rather, unless one speak of a moral necessity) ’the assent of the soul; experience teaches us that.  In the schools