spoken of M. Diroys and others who have also been
deluded by this strange opinion, one that is far too commonly accepted.
Those who uphold it do not observe that it implies a wish to preserve for,
or rather bestow upon, God a false freedom, which is the freedom to act
unreasonably. That is rendering his works subject to correction, and making
it impossible for us to say or even to hope that anything reasonable can be
said upon the permission of evil.

340. This error has much impaired M. Bayle's arguments, and has barred his
way of escape from many perplexities. That appears again in relation to the
laws of the realm of Nature: he believes them to be arbitrary and
indifferent, and he objects that God could better have attained his end in
the realm of grace if he had not clung to these laws, if he had more often
dispensed with their observance, or even if he had made others. He believed
this especially with regard to the law of the union between the soul and
the body. For he is persuaded, with the modern Cartesians, that the ideas
of the perceptible qualities that God gives (according to them) to the
soul, occasioned by movements of the body, have nothing representing these
movements or resembling them. Accordingly it was a purely arbitrary act on
God's part to give us the ideas of heat, cold, light and other qualities
which we experience, rather than to give us quite different ideas
occasioned in the same way. I have often wondered that people so talented
should have been capable of relishing notions so unphilosophic and so
contrary to the fundamental maxims of reason. For nothing gives clearer
indication of the imperfection of a philosophy than the necessity
experienced by the philosopher to confess that something comes to pass, in
accordance with his system, for which there is no reason. That applies to
the idea of Epicurus on the deviation of atoms. Whether it be God or Nature
that operates, the operation will always have its reasons. In the
operations of Nature, these reasons will depend either upon necessary
truths or upon the laws that God has found the most reasonable; and in the
operations of God, they will depend upon the choice of the supreme [330]
reason which causes them to act.

341. M. Regis, a famous Cartesian, had asserted in his 'Metaphysics' (part
2, book 2, c. 29) that the faculties God has given to men are the most
excellent that they were capable of in conformity with the general order of
nature.