16

30

saw. St Augustine, on the contrary, while holding it impious
to think them to be violations of Nature's
Laws, regards them apparently as occurences
that are to us what the reading of a letter by a
man might seem to a dog to be, namely, a
manifestation of some higher mastery of things
than would be compatible with his nature.

One fallacy into which the necessitarians
of class C generally fall in that they imagineing
that they can disprove that anything happens by chance
by showing that the event has a cause. Thus Boethius at
the beginning of the 5th book of his consolations, after
citing Aristotle as a necessitarian, which is enough
to take one's breath away, so monstrous is the blunder or
the impudence of it, has a little ode of twelve lines