again he will act on caprice or through some other passion, or finally he must act through a prevailing inclination of reason which prompts him to the best.  But passions, which come from the confused perception of an apparent good, cannot occur in God; and vague indifference is something chimerical.  It is therefore only the strongest reason that can regulate God’s choice.  It is an imperfection in our freedom that makes us capable of choosing evil instead of good, a greater evil instead of the lesser evil, the lesser good instead of the greater good.  That arises from the appearances of good and evil, which deceive us; whereas God is always prompted to the true and the greatest good, that is, to the absolutely true good, which he cannot fail to know.

320.  This false idea of freedom, conceived by those who, not content with exempting it, I do not say from constraint, but from necessity itself, would also exempt it from certainty and determination, that is, from reason and perfection, nevertheless pleased some Schoolmen, people who often become entangled in their own subtleties, and take the straw of terms for the grain of things.  They assume some chimerical notion, whence they think to derive some use, and which they endeavour to maintain by quibblings.  Complete indifference is of this nature:  to concede it to the will is to grant it a privilege of the kind that some Cartesians and some mystics find in the divine nature, of being able to do the impossible, to produce absurdities, to cause two contradictory propositions to be true simultaneously.  To claim that a determination comes from a complete indifference absolutely indeterminate is to claim that it comes naturally from nothing.  Let it be assumed that God does not give this determination:  it has accordingly no fountainhead in the soul, nor in the body, nor in circumstances, since all is assumed to be indeterminate; and yet there it is, appearing and existing without preparation, nothing making ready for it, no angel, not even God himself, being able to see or to show how it exists.  That would be not only the emergence of something from nothing, but its emergence thence of itself.  This doctrine introduces something as preposterous as the theory already mentioned, of the deviation of atoms, whereby Epicurus asserted that one of these small bodies, going in a straight line, would turn aside all at once from its path, without any[320] reason, simply because the will so commands.  Take note moreover that he resorted to that only to justify this alleged freedom of complete indifference, a chimerical notion which appears to be of very ancient origin; and one may with good reason say:  Chimaera Chimaeram parit.

321.  This is the way Signor Marchetti has expressed it in his admirable translation of Lucretius into Italian verse, which has not yet been published (Book 2):