Ninthly: The divine foresight of human volitions need not be supposed to necessitate them, any more than human foresight, inasmuch as foreseeing them, has no necessary connexion in any case with their causation. Again, if it does not appear essential to the divine foresight of volitions that they should be necessary. We have seen that future contingent volitions may be calculated with a high degree of certainty even by men; and now supposing that the divine being must proceed in the same way to calculate them through _media_,--the reach and accuracy of his calculations must be in the proportion of his intelligence, and how far short of a certain and perfect knowledge of all future contingent volitions can infinite intelligence be supposed to fall by such calculations? Tenthly: But we may not suppose that the infinite mind is compelled to resort to deduction, or to employ _media_ for arriving at any particular knowledge. In the attribute of prescience, he is really present to all the possible and actual of the future. III. The third and last point of Edwards's argument is as follows: "To suppose the future volitions of moral agents, not to be necessary events; or which is the same thing, events which it is not impossible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to suppose God's knowledge to be inconsistent with itself. For to say that God certainly and without all conjecture, knows that a thing will infallibly be, which at the same time he knows to be so contingent, that it may possibly not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsistent with itself; or that one thing he knows is utterly inconsistent with another thing he knows." (page 117.) The substance of this reasoning is this. That inasmuch as a contingent future event is _uncertain_ from its very nature and definition, it cannot be called an object of _certain_ knowledge, to any mind, not even to the divine mind, without a manifest contradiction. "It is the same as to say, he now knows a proposition to be of certain infallible truth, which he knows to be of contingent uncertain truth." We have here again an error arising from not making a proper distinction, which I have already pointed out,--the distinction between the certainty of a future volition as a mere fact existent, and the manner in which that fact came to exist.