Si non vult Deus esse malum, cur non vetat? inquit. Non refert auctor fuerit, factorve malorum. Anne opera in vitium sceleris pulcherrima verti, Cum possit prohibere, sinat; quod si velit omnes Innocuos agere Omnipotens, ne sancta voluntas Degeneret, facto nec se manus inquinet ullo? Condidit ergo malum Dominus, quod spectat ab alto, Et patitur fierique probat, tanquam ipse crearit. Ipse creavit enim, quod si discludere possit, Non abolet, longoque sinit grassarier usu.

But I have already answered that sufficiently.  Man is himself the source of his evils:  just as he is, he was in the divine idea.  God, prompted by essential reasons of wisdom, decreed that he should pass into existence just as he is.  M. Bayle would perchance have perceived this origin of evil in the form in which I demonstrate it here, if he had herein combined the wisdom of God with his power, his goodness and his holiness.  I will add, in passing, that his holiness is nothing other than the highest degree of goodness, just as the crime which is its opposite is the worst of all evil.

152.  M. Bayle places the Greek philosopher Melissus, champion of the oneness of the first principle (and perhaps even of the oneness of substance) in conflict with Zoroaster, as with the first originator of duality.  Zoroaster admits that the hypothesis of Melissus is more consistent with order and a priori reasons, but he denies its conformity with experience and a posteriori reasons.  ‘I surpass you’, he said, ’in the explanation of phenomena, which is the principal mark of a good system.’  But, in my opinion, it is not a very good explanation of a phenomenon to assign to it an ad hoc principle:  to evil, a principium maleficum, to cold, a primum frigidum; there is nothing so easy and nothing so dull.  It is well-nigh as if someone were to say that the [219] Peripatetics surpass the new mathematicians in the explanation of the phenomena of the stars, by giving them ad hoc intelligences to guide them.  According to that, it is quite easy to conceive why the planets make their way with such precision; whereas there is need of much geometry and reflexion to understand how from the gravity of the planets, which bears them towards the sun, combined with some whirlwind which carries them along, or with their own motive force, can spring the elliptic movement of Kepler, which satisfies appearances so well.  A man incapable of relishing deep speculations will at first applaud the Peripatetics and will treat our mathematicians as dreamers.  Some old Galenist will do the same with regard to the faculties of the Schoolmen:  he will admit a chylific, a chymific and a sanguific, and he will assign one of these ad hoc to each operation; he will think he has worked wonders, and will laugh at what he will call the chimeras of the moderns, who claim to explain through mechanical structure what passes in the body of an animal.