the necessitating cause of specification. The response is: If you make Him a source of generation that necessitates its effects by His very essence, the objection applies all the more forcefully. Your ignorance, given the absence of a specifying, determining cause, would entail an even greater difficulty than your ignorance of that cause on the assumption that He specifies by His will.

For it may be said: If the world is generated from Him and necessarily accompanies His essence, inseparable from it, and He cannot end its necessary connection to Him or its generation from Him, nor bring about its nonexistence—as you maintain—then what necessitates His being like this, with all the limitation, incapacity, and deficiency that this entails? An essence necessarily accompanied by something else that is generated from it and cannot be separated from it, whose generation and necessary connection it cannot prevent, and which it would be powerless to prevent even if it wished to do so, is undoubtedly less perfect than an essence capable of preventing this, which could repel it if it so wished.

Even if it were not less perfect, its having this manner of generation, necessitation, entailment, and production must still have a necessitating cause. For being such is itself a particular determination, since it is conceivable that the necessarily existent essence should be free of this necessary connection and generation. They must therefore say: The necessarily existent essence itself, by virtue of its particular nature, cannot be otherwise than this, with this entailment and generation. For if it could be this way and could also be otherwise, the realization of either possibility would depend upon a determining cause.

If they say this, the response is: It is evident that an essence whose necessary attributes include acting if it wills and refraining if it wills possesses greater power and perfection than one whose necessary attributes include action from which it cannot refrain, even if it wished to do so. Whoever reflects upon this and grasps the distinction will decisively refute these people who have altered the religion of