he appearances of good and evil, which
deceive us; whereas God is always prompted to the true and the greatest
good, that is, to the absolutely true good, which he cannot fail to know.

320. This false idea of freedom, conceived by those who, not content with
exempting it, I do not say from constraint, but from necessity itself,
would also exempt it from certainty and determination, that is, from reason
and perfection, nevertheless pleased some Schoolmen, people who often
become entangled in their own subtleties, and take the straw of terms for
the grain of things. They assume some chimerical notion, whence they think
to derive some use, and which they endeavour to maintain by quibblings.
Complete indifference is of this nature: to concede it to the will is to
grant it a privilege of the kind that some Cartesians and some mystics find
in the divine nature, of being able to do the impossible, to produce
absurdities, to cause two contradictory propositions to be true
simultaneously. To claim that a determination comes from a complete
indifference absolutely indeterminate is to claim that it comes naturally
from nothing. Let it be assumed that God does not give this determination:
it has accordingly no fountainhead in the soul, nor in the body, nor in
circumstances, since all is assumed to be indeterminate; and yet there it
is, appearing and existing without preparation, nothing making ready for
it, no angel, not even God himself, being able to see or to show how it
exists. That would be not only the emergence of something from nothing, but
its emergence thence _of itself_. This doctrine introduces something as
preposterous as the theory already mentioned, of the deviation of atoms,
whereby Epicurus asserted that one of these small bodies, going in a
straight line, would turn aside all at once from its path, without any[320]
reason, simply because the will so commands. Take note moreover that he
resorted to that only to justify this alleged freedom of complete
indifference, a chimerical notion which appears to be of very ancient
origin; and one may with good reason say: _Chimaera Chimaeram parit_.

321. This is the way Signor Marchetti has expressed it in his admirable
translation of Lucretius into Italian verse, which has not yet been
published (Book 2):

_Ma ch'i principii poi non corran punto_
_Della lor dritta via, chi veder puote?_
_Si finalmente ogni lor moto sempre_
_Insieme s'aggruppa, e dall' antico_