The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of dynamics as modern as the dynamo.  Even in the prime motor, from the moment of action, freedom of will vanished.  Creation was not successive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with the will, and was complete and unchangeable from end to end, including time as one of its functions.  Thomas was as clear as possible on that point:—­“Supposing God wills anything in effect; He cannot will not to will it, because His will cannot change.”  He wills that some things shall be contingent and others necessary, but He wills in the same act that the contingency shall be necessary.  “They are contingent because God has willed them to be so, and with this object has subjected them to causes which are so.”  In the same way He wills that His creation shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but He creates these conditions as well as the events.  He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama, with its predetermined contingencies.

Man’s free choice—­liberum arbitrium—­falls easily into place as a predetermined contingency.  God is the first cause, and acts in all secondary causes directly; but while He acts mechanically on the rest of creation,—­as far as is known,—­He acts freely at one point, and this free action remains free as far as it extends on that line.  Man’s freedom derives from this source, but it is simply apparent, as far as he is a cause; it is a reflex action determined by a new agency of the first cause.

However abstruse these ideas may once have sounded, they are far from seeming difficult in comparison with modern theories of energy.  Indeed, measured by that standard, the only striking feature of Saint Thomas’s motor is its simplicity.  Thomas’s prime motor was very powerful, and its lines of energy were infinite.  Among these infinite lines, a certain group ran to the human race, and, as long as the conduction was perfect, each man acted mechanically.  In cases where the current, for any reason, was for a moment checked,—­that is to say, produced the effect of hesitation or reflection in the mind,—­the current accumulated until it acquired power to leap the obstacle.  As Saint Thomas expressed it, the Prime Motor, Who was nothing else than God, intervened to decide the channel of the current.  The only difference between man and a vegetable was the reflex action of the complicated mirror which was called mind, and the mark of mind was reflective absorption or choice.  The apparent freedom was an illusion arising from the extreme delicacy of the machine, but the motive power was in fact the same—­that of God.