3.  But this author’s humour, which prompts him to paradoxes and makes him seek to contradict others, has made him draw out exaggerated and odious conclusions and expressions, as if everything happened through an absolute necessity.  The Bishop of Derry, on the other hand, has aptly observed in the answer to article 35, page 327, that there results only a hypothetical necessity, such as we all grant to events in relation to the foreknowledge of God, while Mr. Hobbes maintains that even divine foreknowledge alone would be sufficient to establish an absolute necessity of events.  This was also the opinion of Wyclif, and even of Luther, when he wrote De Servo Arbitrio; or at least they spoke so.  But it is sufficiently acknowledged to-day that this kind of necessity which is termed hypothetical, and springs from foreknowledge or from other anterior reasons, has nothing in it to arouse one’s alarm:  whereas it would be quite otherwise if the thing were necessary of itself, in such a way that the contrary implied contradiction.  Mr. Hobbes refuses to listen to anything about a moral necessity either, on the ground that everything really happens through physical causes.  But one is nevertheless justified in making a great difference between the necessity which constrains the wise to do good, and which is termed moral, existing even in relation to God, and that blind necessity whereby according to Epicurus, Strato, Spinoza, and perhaps Mr. Hobbes, things exist without intelligence and without choice, and consequently without God.  Indeed, there would according to them be no need of God, since in consequence of this necessity all would have existence through its own essence, just as necessarily as two and three make five.  And this necessity is absolute, because everything it carries with it must happen, whatever one may do; whereas what happens by a hypothetical necessity happens as a result of the supposition that this or that has been foreseen or resolved, or done beforehand; and moral necessity contains an obligation imposed by reason, which is always followed by its effect in the wise.  This kind of necessity is happy and desirable, when one is prompted by good reasons to act as one does; but necessity blind and absolute would subvert piety and morality.

4.  There is more reason in Mr. Hobbes’s discourse when he admits that [396] our actions are in our power, so that we do that which we will when we have the power to do it, and when there is no hindrance.  He asserts notwithstanding that our volitions themselves are not so within our power that we can give ourselves, without difficulty and according to our good pleasure, inclinations and wills which we might desire.  The bishop does not appear to have taken notice of this reflexion, which Mr. Hobbes also does not develop enough.  The truth is that we have some power also over our volitions, but obliquely, and not absolutely and indifferently.  This has been explained in some passages of this work.  Finally Mr. Hobbes