heless if I call fantastic
this choice whereto one is determined by nothing, I am far from calling
visionaries the supporters of that hypothesis, especially our gifted
author. The Peripatetics teach some beliefs of this nature; but it would be
the greatest injustice in the world to be ready to despise on that account
an Occam, a Suisset, a Cesalpino, a Conringius, men who still advocated
certain scholastic opinions which have been improved upon to-day.

3. One of these opinions, revived, however, and introduced by [407]
degenerate scholasticism, and in the Age of Chimeras, is vague indifference
of choice, or real chance, assumed in our souls; as if nothing gave us any
inclination unless we perceived it distinctly, and as if an effect could be
without causes, when these causes are imperceptible. It is much as some
have denied the existence of insensible corpuscles because they do not see
them. Modern philosophers have improved upon the opinions of the Schoolmen
by showing that, according to the laws of corporeal nature, a body can only
be set in motion by the movement of another body propelling it. Even so we
must believe that our souls (by virtue of the laws of spiritual nature) can
only be moved by some reason of good or evil: and this even when no
distinct knowledge can be extracted from our mental state, on account of a
concourse of innumerable little perceptions which make us now joyful and
now sad, or again of some other humour, and cause us to like one thing more
than another without its being possible to say why. Plato, Aristotle and
even Thomas Aquinas, Durand and other Schoolmen of the sounder sort reason
on that question like the generality of men, and as unprejudiced people
always have reasoned. They assume that freedom lies in the use of reason
and the inclinations, which cause the choice or rejection of objects. But
finally some rather too subtle philosophers have extracted from their
alembic an inexplicable notion of choice independent of anything
whatsoever, which is said to do wonders in solving all difficulties. But
the notion is caught up at the outset in one of the greatest difficulties,
by offending against the grand principle of reasoning which makes us always
assume that nothing is done without some sufficient cause or reason. As the
Schoolmen often forgot to apply this great principle, admitting certain
prime occult qualities, one need not wonder if this fiction of vague
indifference met wit