Milton's Paradise Lost

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 Excerpt: ...to be true and not incompatible with the truth of the proposition in the subordinate clause. Thus 'if' is here nearly equivalent to 'although.' The argument is that God's foreknowledge of the actions of reasonable beings does not interfere with their freedom, as it does not have any influence on their actions. Man would have fallen, whether his fall was foreknown by God or not; therefore God's foreknowledge cannot be said to be the cause of his fall. We can agree with the argument so far. But when Milton proceeds to argue that, as foreknowledge did not necessitate the fall of man, the fall cannot have been necessary, he seems to draw an illegitimate conclusion. On the contrary, foreknowledge from a human point of view implies necessity. Although God's foreknowledge being unknown to us cannot affect our actions, it is nevertheless logically incompatible with our being free. If God knows our actions beforehand, it is plain that one course of action is absolutely fixed for us by our character and circumstances or by the will of God, and our idea that we might with the same character and under the same circumstances have willed to act otherwise is a delusion. If I am absolutely certain that a particular criminal will be condemned to death, my foreknowledge of the fact, though not the cause of his death, is incompatible with the possibility of his escaping death. In the same way God's foreknowledge that a man will yield to a particular temptation seems logically incompatible with the possibility of his willing to resist it. Otherwise God's foreknowledge would be liable to be proved wrong by any capricious exhibition of free will. 119. This line is a premiss to prove the proposition in the previous line. The fact that the fault would certainly have been committed...