You hear 'I've tried and failed before, I'll just fail again' — and you want to tell a prediction from a permission slip.

Satan reasons that even if he repented, it wouldn't hold: "how soon would highth recall high thoughts." The clincher: "ease would recant vows made in pain, as violent and void" — promises made under pressure are null the moment the pressure lifts, so "never can true reconcilement grow." The mechanism: a prediction of failure is promoted to a certainty, and the certainty becomes the excuse for inaction. Fatalism is doing the work of a permission slip.