is the noblest quality of created things, but it is not the only good quality of creatures.  There are innumerable others which attract the inclination of God:  from all these inclinations there results the most possible good, and it turns out that if there were only virtue, if there were only rational creatures, there would be less good.  Midas proved to be less rich when he had only gold.  And besides, wisdom must vary.  To multiply one and the same thing only would be superfluity, and poverty too.  To have a thousand well-bound Vergils in one’s library, always to sing the airs from the opera of Cadmus and Hermione, to break all the china in order only to have cups of gold, to have only diamond buttons, to eat nothing but partridges, to drink only Hungarian or Shiraz wine—­would one call that reason?  Nature had need of animals, plants, inanimate bodies; there are in these creatures, devoid of reason, marvels which serve for exercise of the reason.  What would an intelligent creature do if there were no unintelligent things?  What would it think of, if there were neither movement, nor matter, nor sense?  If it had only distinct thoughts it would be a God, its wisdom would be without bounds:  that is one of the results of my meditations.  As soon as there is a mixture of confused thoughts, there is sense, there is matter.  For these confused thoughts come from the relation of all things one to the other by way of duration and extent.  Thus it is that in my philosophy there is no rational creature without some organic body, and there is no created spirit entirely detached from matter.  But these organic bodies vary no less in perfection than the spirits to which they belong.  Therefore, since God’s wisdom must have a world of bodies, a world of substances capable of perception and incapable of reason; since, in short, it was necessary to choose from all the things possible what produced the best effect together, and since vice entered in by this door, God would not have been altogether good, altogether wise if he had excluded it.

[199] 125.  X.  ’The way to evince the greatest hatred for vice is not indeed to allow it to prevail for a long time and then chastise it, but to crush it before its birth, that is, prevent it from showing itself anywhere.  A king, for example, who put his finances in such good order that no malversation was ever committed, would thus display more hatred for the wrong done by factionaries than if, after having suffered them to batten on the blood of the people, he had them hanged.’

It is always the same song, it is anthropomorphism pure and simple.  A king should generally have nothing so much at heart as to keep his subjects free from oppression.  One of his greatest interests is to bring good order into his finances.  Nevertheless there are times when he is obliged to tolerate vice and disorders.  He has a great war on his hands, he is in a state of exhaustion, he has no choice of generals, it is necessary to humour those he has,