We admit, say some, that there are many perfections peculiar to the Supreme Being, the study and knowledge of which ought to serve to sustain the laws of morality; but one of the essential properties of the divine essence oversets the whole structure, it is prescience: for, as God knows beforehand what we are to do, it follows, that all our actions are irrevocably determined; and thus man is not free. And, if such is his condition, he deserves neither praise nor censure; he has no means of pleasing or displeasing the Supreme Being, and the ideas of good and evil, of virtue and vice, are absolutely chimerical. I shall, at first, make a very simple reply to this objection, but a very decisive one: it is that, if against appearances you should happen to persuade me, that there now exists an absolute contradiction between the liberty of man and the prescience of the Deity, it is on the nature and extent of this prescience that I shall raise my doubts; for, forced to choose, I should rather mistrust the judgment of my own mind, than that of an internal persuasion. It is by these same considerations, that it will always be impossible to prove to men that they are not free: we could only succeed with the assistance of reasoning, and reasoning being already a beginning of art, a kind of exterior combination of reflections, this means, in some measure out of us, would not have power to eradicate a sentiment which seems the first that we are conscious of. We soon discover the limits of our faculties, in the efforts which we make to acquire a just idea of the divine prescience: we can very well suppose, that God foresees with certainty what we only conjecture about, and in extending without end the bounds which occur to our mind, we shall proportion in our imagination, the knowledge of the Creator to the immensity of space, and to the infinity of time; but beyond these vague ideas we shall err in all our speculations. How is it possible, that men, who know not even the nature of their own souls, should be able to determine the nature of prescience? How is it possible, that they can know whether this prescience is the effect of a rapid calculation of him, who embraces at one glance the relation and effects of every moral and natural cause? how can they discern, whether this prescience, in an Infinite Being, is distinct from simple knowledge? How can they know whether that Being, by a property beyond our conception, does not exist before and after events, whether he is not, in some manner, the intellectual time, and whether our divisions of years and ages, would not disappear before his immoveable existence and eternal duration. It results, however, from these considerations, that on account of our extreme ignorance we cannot accurately define prescience; but we are reduced to examine whether this prescience, considered in a general manner, is incompatible with the liberty of man.