absolutely contemptible or absolutely precious before God.  And the abuse or the exaggerated extension of the present maxim appears to be in part the source of the difficulties that M. Bayle puts forward.  It is certain that God sets greater store by a man than a lion; nevertheless it can hardly be said with certainty that God prefers a single man in all respects to the whole of lion-kind.  Even should that be so, it would by no means follow that the interest of a certain number of men would prevail over the [189] consideration of a general disorder diffused through an infinite number of creatures.  This opinion would be a remnant of the old and somewhat discredited maxim, that all is made solely for man.

119.  IV.  ’The benefits he imparts to the creatures that are capable of felicity tend only to their happiness.  He therefore does not permit that these should serve to make them unhappy, and, if the wrong use that they made of them were capable of destroying them, he would give them sure means of always using them well.  Otherwise they would not be true benefits, and his goodness would be smaller than that we can conceive of in another benefactor. (I mean, in a Cause that united with its gifts the sure skill to make good use of them.)’

There already is the abuse or the ill effect of the preceding maxim.  It is not strictly true (though it appear plausible) that the benefits God imparts to the creatures who are capable of felicity tend solely to their happiness.  All is connected in Nature; and if a skilled artisan, an engineer, an architect, a wise politician often makes one and the same thing serve several ends, if he makes a double hit with a single throw, when that can be done conveniently, one may say that God, whose wisdom and power are perfect, does so always.  That is husbanding the ground, the time, the place, the material, which make up as it were his outlay.  Thus God has more than one purpose in his projects.  The felicity of all rational creatures is one of the aims he has in view; but it is not his whole aim, nor even his final aim.  Therefore it happens that the unhappiness of some of these creatures may come about by concomitance, and as a result of other greater goods:  this I have already explained, and M. Bayle has to some extent acknowledged it.  The goods as such, considered in themselves, are the object of the antecedent will of God.  God will produce as much reason and knowledge in the universe as his plan can admit.  One can conceive of a mean between an antecedent will altogether pure and primitive, and a consequent and final will.  The primitive antecedent will has as its object each good and each evil in itself, detached from all combination, and tends to advance the good and prevent the evil.  The mediate will relates to combinations, as when one attaches a good to an evil:  then the will will have some tendency towards this combination when the good exceeds the evil therein.