Whereupon, regarding myself more closely, and considering
what are my errors (for they alone testify to there being any
imperfection in me), I answer that they depend on a
combination of two causes, to wit, on the faculty of knowledge
that rests in me, and on the power of choice or of free
will?that is to say, of the understanding and at the same time
of the will. For by the understanding alone I [neither assert
nor deny anything, but] apprehend19 the ideas of things as to
which I can form a judgment. But no error is properly
speaking found in it, provided the word error is taken in its
proper signification; and though there is possibly an
infinitude of things in the world of which I have no idea in
my understanding, we cannot for all that say that it is
deprived of these ideas [as we might say of something which is
required by its nature], but simply it does not possess these;
because in truth there is no reason to prove that God should
have given me a greater faculty of knowledge than He has given
me; and however skillful a workman I represent Him to be, I
should not for all that consider that He was bound to have
placed in each of His works all the perfections which He may
have been able to place in some.
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