3. The rude toil one must exercise in order to gain sustenance.
4. The subjection of the woman to the will of the husband.
5. The pains of childbirth.
6. The enmity between man and the serpent.
7. The banishment of man from the place of delight wherein God had placed him.
But our author thinks that many of our evils spring from the necessity of matter, especially since the withdrawal of grace. Moreover, it seems to him that after our banishment immortality would be only a burden to us, and that it is perhaps more for our good than to punish us that the tree of life has become inaccessible to us. On one point or another one might have something to say in objection, but the body of the discourse by our author on the origin of evils is full of good and sound reflexions, which I have judged it advisable to turn to advantage. Now I must pass on to the subject of our controversy, that is, the explanation of the nature of freedom.
12. The learned author of this work on the origin of evil, proposing to explain the origin of moral evil in the fifth chapter, which makes up half of the whole book, considers that it is altogether different from that of physical evil, which lies in the inevitable imperfection of creatures. For, as we shall see presently, it appears to him that moral evil comes rather from that which he calls a perfection, which the creature has in common, according to him, with the Creator, that is to say, in the power of choosing without any motive and without any final or impelling cause. It is a very great paradox to assert that the greatest imperfection, namely sin, springs from perfection itself. But it is no less a paradox to present as a perfection the thing which is the least reasonable in the world, the advantage whereof would consist in being privileged against reason. And that, after all, rather than pointing out the source of the evil, would be to contend that it has none. For if the will makes its resolve without the existence of anything, either in the person who chooses or in the object which is chosen, to prompt it to the choice, there will be neither cause nor reason for this election; and as moral evil consists in the wrong choice, that is admitting that moral evil has no source at all. Thus in the rules of good metaphysics there would have to be no moral evil in Nature; and also for the same reason there would be no moral good either, and all morality would be destroyed. But we must listen to our gifted author, from whom the subtlety of an opinion maintained by famous philosophers among the Schoolmen, and
the adornments that he has added thereto himself by his wit and his eloquence, have hidden the great disadvantages contained therein. In setting forth the position reached in the controversy, he divides the writers into two parties. The one sort, he says, are content to say that the freedom of the will is exempt from outward constraint; and the other sort maintain that it is also exempt from inward necessity. But this exposition does not suffice, unless one distinguish the necessity that is absolute and contrary to morality from hypothetical necessity and moral necessity, as I have already explained in many places.
13. The first section of this chapter is to indicate the nature of choice. The author sets forth in the first place the opinion of those who believe that the will is prompted by the judgement of the understanding, or by anterior inclinations of the desires, to resolve upon the course that it adopts. But he confuses these authors with those who assert that the will is prompted to its resolution by an absolute necessity, and who maintain that the person who wills has no power over his volitions: that is, he confuses a Thomist with a Spinozist. He makes use of the admissions and the odious declarations of Mr. Hobbes and his like, to lay them to the charge of those who are infinitely far removed from them, and who take great care to refute them. He lays these things to their charge because they believe, as Mr. Hobbes believes, like everyone else (save for some doctors who are enveloped in their own subtleties), that the will is moved by the representation of good and evil. Thence he imputes to them the opinion that there is therefore no such thing as contingency, and that all is connected by an absolute necessity. That is a very speedy manner of reasoning; yet he adds also, that properly speaking there will be no evil will, since if there were, all one could object to therein would be the evil which it can cause. That, he says, is different from the common notion, since the world censures the wicked not because they do harm, but because they do harm without necessity. He holds also that the wicked would be only unfortunate and by no means culpable; that there would be no difference between physical evil and moral evil, since man himself would not be the true cause of an action which he could not avoid; that evil-doers would not be either blamed or maltreated because they deserve it, but because that action may serve to turn people away from evil; again, for this reason only one would find fault with a rogue, but