and moral necessity, which constrains the wisest to choose the best; finally, provided that one is rid of the chimera of complete indifference, which can only be found in the books of philosophers, and on paper (for they cannot even conceive the notion in their heads, or prove its reality by an example in things) one will easily escape from a labyrinth whose unhappy Daedalus was the human mind.  That labyrinth has caused infinite confusion, as much with the ancients as with those of later times, even so far as to lead men into the absurd error of the Lazy Sophism, which closely resembles fate after the Turkish fashion.  I do not wonder if in reality the Thomists and the Jesuits, and even the Molinists and the Jansenists, agree together on this matter more than is supposed.  A Thomist and even a wise Jansenist will content himself with certain determination, without going on to necessity:  and if someone goes so far, the error mayhap will lie only in the word.  A wise Molinist will be content with an indifference opposed to necessity, but such as shall not exclude prevalent inclinations.

368.  These difficulties, however, have greatly impressed M. Bayle, who[346] was more inclined to dwell on them than to solve them, although he might perhaps have had better success than anyone if he had thought fit to turn his mind in that direction.  Here is what he says of them in his Dictionary, art.  ‘Jansenius’, lit.  G, p. 1626:  ’Someone has said that the subject of Grace is an ocean which has neither shore nor bottom.  Perhaps he would have spoken more correctly if he had compared it to the Strait of Messina, where one is always in danger of striking one reef while endeavouring to avoid another.

  Dextrum Scylla latus, laevum implacata Charybdis
  Obsidet.

Everything comes back in the end to this:  Did Adam sin freely?  If you answer yes, then you will be told, his fall was not foreseen.  If you answer no, then you will be told, he is not guilty.  You may write a hundred volumes against the one or the other of these conclusions, and yet you will confess, either that the infallible prevision of a contingent event is a mystery impossible to conceive, or that the way in which a creature which acts without freedom sins nevertheless is altogether incomprehensible.’

369.  Either I am greatly mistaken or these two alleged incomprehensibilities are ended altogether by my solutions.  Would to God it were as easy to answer the question how to cure fevers, and how to avoid the perils of two chronic sicknesses that may originate, the one from not curing the fever, the other from curing it wrongly.  When one asserts that a free event cannot be foreseen, one is confusing freedom with indetermination, or with indifference that is complete and in equipoise; and when one maintains that the lack of freedom would prevent man from being guilty, one means a freedom exempt, not from determination or from certainty, but from necessity and from constraint.