B. Against the Response of Henry

25. Against these remarks.

First: as to what he posits about the assistance of nature for the will, so that the will, by force of that assistance, can communicate nature [n.21], I ask what is that assistance? It seems that it is not necessary for the communication, because, once there is in place a perfect agent supposit and one that is appropriate to the action, and a perfect ‘by which’ principle for the acting, it does not seem that anything else is necessary for acting; but for you the will alone is the ‘by which’ principle in respect of the notional act, and it is clear that the supposit is perfect and appropriate to the action; therefore the assistance does not seem necessary for such production.See Appendix Point F. ¹¹¹

26. Further, that a single necessity is posited in the will and a double one in the inspiriting [n.24] seems to be against both him and the truth, because he himself posits that the notional acts are founded on the essential ones, and everyone commonly concedes that the essential acts in some way precede the notional ones. But it does not seem that in something founded there can be any necessity formally greater than the necessity in that on which it is founded, or it does not seem that a double necessity will exist in the thing founded and a single one in the foundation; the proof is that then, when, per impossibile or per incompossibile, one necessity is separated from the other (namely the necessity which the founded thing had from the foundation), the founded thing will remain necessary, because only one of the necessities it had will, in the foundation, be removed; therefore - once this position [of a double necessity] is supposed - necessity could exist in the founded thing and not in that on which it is founded. This to the proposal, because if the act of inspiriting has necessity from the freedom of the will and -besides this - from the necessity of naturality annexed to the will, and if the act of simple love has only the one first necessity, then, with the first necessity removed, all the necessity will be removed that there was in the foundation, and yet there will still remain the other necessity in the production, namely that which is from the naturality.

27. Further, it seems that the whole of the naturality is not consequent to the act of will, because - for him [Henry] - it belongs to the will from the fact that it is founded in the divine essence [n.21]; therefore, since the idea of the divine essence is prior to the idea of the will, whatever is consequent to the idea of the essence, or to the will by reason of the essence, will be consequent to the essence before that which is consequent to the will, as it is will, will be; and so it seems that the naturality in some way precedes the liberty, and as a result it will impede the liberty.

28. Further, against the opinion.

What would that argument be which he himself makes, ‘if the intellect and the will were principles of communicating the nature whereby they are such principles, then such powers in creatures would be principles of communicating nature’ [n.18], if there were an altogether different formal idea of intellect and will in God and in creatures?

29. Further, what necessity is there for distinguishing between the will, which he posits as the principle of eliciting the act, and the nature, which he posits as co-assistant of the eliciting will [n.21], if there is between them only a distinction of reason, as he seems elsewhere to think about the distinction of attributes in divine reality?