here [329] already seen how the excellent M. Bayle, with all his shrewdness, has nevertheless combated this principle which I have just indicated, and which is a sure consequence of the supreme perfection of God.  He thought to defend in that way the cause of God and to exempt him from an imaginary necessity, by leaving him the freedom to choose from among various goods the least.  I have already spoken of M. Diroys and others who have also been deluded by this strange opinion, one that is far too commonly accepted.  Those who uphold it do not observe that it implies a wish to preserve for, or rather bestow upon, God a false freedom, which is the freedom to act unreasonably.  That is rendering his works subject to correction, and making it impossible for us to say or even to hope that anything reasonable can be said upon the permission of evil.

340.  This error has much impaired M. Bayle’s arguments, and has barred his way of escape from many perplexities.  That appears again in relation to the laws of the realm of Nature:  he believes them to be arbitrary and indifferent, and he objects that God could better have attained his end in the realm of grace if he had not clung to these laws, if he had more often dispensed with their observance, or even if he had made others.  He believed this especially with regard to the law of the union between the soul and the body.  For he is persuaded, with the modern Cartesians, that the ideas of the perceptible qualities that God gives (according to them) to the soul, occasioned by movements of the body, have nothing representing these movements or resembling them.  Accordingly it was a purely arbitrary act on God’s part to give us the ideas of heat, cold, light and other qualities which we experience, rather than to give us quite different ideas occasioned in the same way.  I have often wondered that people so talented should have been capable of relishing notions so unphilosophic and so contrary to the fundamental maxims of reason.  For nothing gives clearer indication of the imperfection of a philosophy than the necessity experienced by the philosopher to confess that something comes to pass, in accordance with his system, for which there is no reason.  That applies to the idea of Epicurus on the deviation of atoms.  Whether it be God or Nature that operates, the operation will always have its reasons.  In the operations of Nature, these reasons will depend either upon necessary truths or upon the laws that God has found the most reasonable; and in the operations of God, they will depend upon the choice of the supreme [330] reason which causes them to act.