147.  Here is another particular reason for the disorder apparent in that which concerns man.  It is that God, in giving him intelligence, has presented him with an image of the Divinity.  He leaves him to himself, in a sense, in his small department, ut Spartam quam nactus est ornet.  He enters there only in a secret way, for he supplies being, force, life, reason, without showing himself.  It is there that free will plays its game:  and God makes game (so to speak) of these little Gods that he has thought good to produce, as we make game of children who follow pursuits which we secretly encourage or hinder according as it pleases us.  Thus man is there like a little god in his own world or Microcosm, which he governs [216] after his own fashion:  he sometimes performs wonders therein, and his art often imitates nature.

  Jupiter in parvo cum cerneret aethera vitro,
    Risit et ad Superos talia dicta dedit:
  Huccine mortalis progressa potentia, Divi?
    Jam meus in fragili luditur orbe labor.
  Jura poli rerumque fidem legesque Deorum
    Cuncta Syracusius transtulit arte Senex.
  Quid falso insontem tonitru Salmonea miror?
    Aemula Naturae est parva reperta manus.

But he also commits great errors, because he abandons himself to the passions, and because God abandons him to his own way.  God punishes him also for such errors, now like a father or tutor, training or chastising children, now like a just judge, punishing those who forsake him:  and evil comes to pass most frequently when these intelligences or their small worlds come into collision.  Man finds himself the worse for this, in proportion to his fault; but God, by a wonderful art, turns all the errors of these little worlds to the greater adornment of his great world.  It is as in those devices of perspective, where certain beautiful designs look like mere confusion until one restores them to the right angle of vision or one views them by means of a certain glass or mirror.  It is by placing and using them properly that one makes them serve as adornment for a room.  Thus the apparent deformities of our little worlds combine to become beauties in the great world, and have nothing in them which is opposed to the oneness of an infinitely perfect universal principle:  on the contrary, they increase our wonder at the wisdom of him who makes evil serve the greater good.

148.  M. Bayle continues:  ’that man is wicked and miserable; that there are everywhere prisons and hospitals; that history is simply a collection of the crimes and calamities of the human race.’  I think that there is exaggeration in that:  there is incomparably more good than evil in the life of men, as there are incomparably more houses than prisons.  With regard to virtue and vice, a certain mediocrity prevails.  Machiavelli has already observed that there are few very wicked and very good men, and that this causes the failure of many great enterprises.  I find it a great fault in historians that they keep their mind on the evil more than on the [217] good.  The chief end of history, as also of poetry, should be to teach prudence and virtue by examples, and then to display vice in such a way as to create aversion to it and to prompt men to avoid it, or serve towards that end.