ception of the nature of good and truth, and "he is never
indifferent except when he is ignorant of it, or at least does not see
it so clearly as to be lifted above the possibility of doubt."[9]
Indifference of will is to him "the lowest grade of liberty," yet, on
the other hand, in nothing does the image of God in him show itself
more clearly than in the fact that his will is not limited by his
clear and distinct knowledge, but is "in a manner infinite." For
"there is no object of any will, even the infinite will of God, to
which our will does not extend."[10] Belief is a free act, for as we
can yield our assent to the obscure conceptions presented by sense and
the imagination, and thus allow ourselves to be led into error, so on
the other hand we can refuse to give this assent, or allow ourselves
to be determined by anything but the clear and distinct ideas of
intelligence. That which makes it possible for us to err is that also
in which the divine image in us is most clearly seen. We cannot have
the freedom of God whose will creates the object of his knowledge; but
in reserving our assent for the clear and distinct perceptions of
intelligence, we, as it were, re-enact for ourselves the divine law,
and repeat, so far as is possible to finite beings, the transcendent
act of will in which truth and good had their origin.

The inherent defect of this view is the divorce it makes between the
form and the matter of intelligence. It implies that reason or
self-consciousness is one thing, and that truth is another and quite
different thing, which has been united to it by the arbitrary will of
God. The same external conception of the relation of truth to the mind
is involved in the doctrine of innate ideas. It is true that Descartes
did not hold that doctrine in the coarse form in which it was
attributed to him by Locke, but expressly declares that he has "never
said or thought at any time that the mind required innate ideas which
were separated from the faculty of thinking. He had simply used the
word innate to distinguish those ideas which are derived from that
faculty, and not from external objects or the determination of the
will. Just as when we say generosity is innate in certain families,
and in certain others diseases, like the gout or the stone, we do not
mean to imply that infants in their mother's womb are affected with
these complaints."[11] Yet