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 call the fictions that are not even
possible. As for me, I should have preferred to call them 'beings of
non-reasoning reason'. Also I think that the third section (on wrong
elections) may pass, since it says that one must not choose things that are
impossible, inconsistent, harmful, contrary to the divine will, or already
taken by others. Moreover, the author remarks appositely that by
prejudicing the happiness of others needlessly one offends the divine will,
which desires that all be happy as far as it is possible. I will say as
much of the fourth section, where ther