reason stronger to outward appearance, such as, for instance, is the pleasure of appearing independent and of performing an extraordinary action.  There was in days past at the Court of Osnabrueck a tutor to the pages, who, like a second Mucius Scaevola, held out his arm into the flame and looked like getting a gangrene, in order to show that the strength of his mind was greater than a very acute pain.  Few people will follow his example; and I do not even know if a writer could easily be found who, having once affirmed the existence of a power capable of choosing without cause, or even contrary to reason, would be willing to prove his case by his own example, in renouncing some good benefice or some high office, simply in order to display this superiority of will over reason.  But I am sure at the least that an intelligent man would not do so.  He would be presently aware that someone would nullify his sacrifice by pointing out to him that he had simply imitated Heliodorus, Bishop of Larissa.  That man (so it is said) held his book on Theagenes and Chariclea dearer than his bishopric; and such a thing may easily happen when a man has resources enabling him to dispense with his office and when he is sensitive to reputation.  Thus every day people are found ready to sacrifice their advantages to their caprices, that is to say, actual goods to the mere semblance of them.

26.  If I wished to follow step by step the arguments of our gifted author, which often come back to matters previously considered in our inquiry, usually however with some elegant and well-phrased addition, I should be obliged to proceed too far; but I hope that I shall be able to avoid doing so, having, as I think, sufficiently met all his reasons.  The best thing is that with him practice usually corrects and amends theory.  After having advanced the hypothesis, in the second section of this fifth chapter, [438] that we approach God through the capacity to choose without reason, and that this power being of the noblest kind its exercise is the most capable of making one happy, things in the highest degree paradoxical, since it is reason which leads us to imitate God and our happiness lies in following reason:  after that, I say, the author provides an excellent corrective, for he says rightly (Sec. 5) that in order to be happy we must adapt our choice to things, since things are scarcely prone to adapt themselves to us, and that this is in effect adapting oneself to the divine will.  Doubtless that is well said, but it implies besides that our will must be guided as far as possible by the reality of the objects, and by true representations of good and evil.  Consequently also the motives of good and evil are not opposed to freedom, and the power of choosing without cause, far from ministering to our happiness, will be useless and even highly prejudicial.  Thus it is happily the case that this power nowhere exists, and that it is ’a being of reasoning reason’, as some Schoolmen