ation may be applied to the will, as any one may
easily see for himself.

III

All things which are, are in God and must be conceived through Him and
therefore He is the cause of the things which are in Himself. Moreover,
outside God there can be no substance, that is to say (Def. 3), outside
Him nothing can exist which is in itself. God, therefore, is the
immanent, but not the transitive cause of all things.

_The Necessity of All Things_

In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined
from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain
manner.... That which has not been thus determined by God cannot
determine itself to action. A thing which has been determined by God to
any action cannot render itself indeterminate.

... All things have necessarily followed from the given nature of God
and from the necessity of His nature have been determined to existence
and action in a certain manner. If therefore things could have been of
another nature, or could have been determined in another manner to
action, so that the order of nature would have been different, the
nature of God might then be different to that which it now is, and hence
that different nature would necessarily exist, and there might
consequently be two or more Gods, which is absurd. Therefore things
could be produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than
that in which they have been produced.

Since I have thus shown, with greater clearness, than that of noonday
light, that in things there is absolutely nothing by virtue of which
they can be called contingent, I wish now to explain in a few words what
is to be understood by _contingent_, but, firstly, what is to be
understood by _necessary_ and _impossible_.

A thing is called necessary either in reference to its essence or its
cause. For the existence of a thing necessarily follows either from the
essence and definition of the thing itself, or from a given efficient
cause. In the same way a thing is said to be impossible either because
the essence of the thing itself or its definition involves a
contradiction, or because no external cause exists determinate to the
production of such a thing. But a thing cannot be called contingent
unless with reference to a deficiency in our knowledge. For if we do not
know that the essence of a thing involves a contradiction, or if we
actually know that it involves no contradiction, and nevertheless we can
af