To Florus 5.41

You therefore seek a necessity behind something that cannot exist if it is subject to necessity. If a cause older than the movement itself is assigned to this free movement of the mind, active without compulsion from its origin, the will is not produced at all: it is removed. The very name ‘will’ means nothing other than that the movement does not owe its occurrence to matter. Therefore, when you ask where the will arose, seeking something older than the will itself, you seek not its beginning but its destruction. It cannot be understood to exist if it is attributed either to darkness or to nothing. Nor can that be called will which can exist only as a movement of the mind under no compulsion. If someone compels it, there is indeed a movement, but no will. The will’s force is completed by the definition’s second part: ‘under no compulsion.’ If will is nothing other than a movement of the mind under no compulsion, it is entirely wrong to ask the origin of a thing whose defining condition perishes if something precedes it. Weigh, then, what you ask: ‘Whence could the evil will itself, like an evil tree, arise in the first human being?’ (Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.28.48). In asking this you confess that will came about through an origin. But will is a movement of the mind under no compulsion. All natural causes compel what follows to exist. If will is compelled by preceding causes, it immediately ceases to be will: by receiving such an origin, it loses its defining condition.