“If, now, we attempt to attribute to the Deity the same mode of foresight of which human beings are capable, it will follow, as a strict consequence, that, as God must know exactly and completely the laws to which all the necessary causes in nature are subject—laws which change only according to his will,—he can foresee with absolute certainty all events which will take place in future. The certain foresight of effects, therefore, which is to us possible only in particular cases, and which, even then, is always liable to the limitation that the actual laws of nature are not modified,—this foresight, which, even when most sure, is limited and contingent, must be complete and absolute certainty in God, supposing his foreknowledge to be of like kind with ours.

But it is evident that, according to this hypothesis, the Deity cannot foresee with certainty the volitions of free causes any more than we can; for, as his foresight is founded, as ours is, upon the knowledge of the laws which govern causes, and as the law of free causes is precisely this, that their volitions are not necessary, God cannot calculate, any more than a human being can, the influence of motives, which, in any given case, may act upon such causes. Even his intelligence can lead no further than to conjectures, more probable, indeed, than ours, but never amounting to certainty. According to this hypothesis, we must, therefore, say either that God can foresee, certainly, the future volitions of men, and that man, therefore, is not a free being, or that man is free, and that God, therefore, cannot, any more than we can, foresee his volitions with certainty; and thus Divine prescience and human free-will are brought into direct contradiction.

But, gentlemen, why must there be this contradiction? Merely because we suppose that God foresees the future in the same way in which we foresee it; that his foreknowledge operates like our own. Now, is this, I ask, such an idea as we ought to form of Divine prescience, or such an idea as even the partisans of this system, which I am opposing, form? Have we any reason for thus imposing upon the Deity the limitation of our own feebleness? I think not.

Unendowed as we are, with any faculty of foreseeing the future, it may be difficult for us to conceive of such a faculty in God. But yet can we not from analogy form such an idea? We have now two faculties of perception—of the past by memory, of the present by observation; can we not imagine a third to exist in God—the faculty of perceiving the future, as we perceive the past? What would be the consequence? This: that God, instead of conjecturing, by induction, the acts of human beings from the laws of the causes operating upon them, would see them simply as the results of the free determinations of the will. Such perception of future acts no more implies the necessity of those actions, than the perception of similar acts in the past. To see that effects arise from certain causes is not to force causes to produce them; neither is it to compel these effects to follow. It matters not whether such a perception refers to the past, present, or future; it is merely a perception; and, therefore, far from producing the effect perceived, it even presupposes this effect already produced.

I do not pretend that this vision of what is to be is an operation of which our minds easily conceive. It is difficult to form an image of what we have never experienced; but I do assert, that the power of seeing what no longer exists is full as remarkable as that of seeing what has as yet no being, and that the reason of our readily conceiving of the former is only the fact that we are endowed with such a power: to my reason, the mystery is the same.

But whatever may or may not be in reality the mode of Divine foreknowledge, or however exact may be the image which we attempt to form of it, it always, I say,—and this is the only point I am desirous of proving,—it always remains a matter of uncertainty, which cannot be removed, whether the Divine foreknowledge is of a kind like our own, or not; and as, in the one case, there would not be the same contradiction that there is in the other, between our belief in Divine foreknowledge and human freedom, it is proved true, I think, that no one has a right to assert the existence of such a contradiction, and the necessity that human reason should choose between them.”