208.  Thus one must suppose that, among the general rules which are not absolutely necessary, God chooses those which are the most natural, which it is easiest to explain, and which also are of greatest service for the explanation of other things.  That is doubtless the conclusion most excellent and most pleasing; and even though the System of Pre-established Harmony were not necessary otherwise, because it banishes superfluous miracles, God would have chosen it as being the most harmonious.  The ways of God are those most simple and uniform:  for he chooses rules that least restrict one another.  They are also the most productive in proportion to the simplicity of ways and means.  It is as if one said that a certain house was the best that could have been constructed at a certain cost.  One may, indeed, reduce these two conditions, simplicity and productivity, to a single advantage, which is to produce as much perfection as is possible:  thus Father Malebranche’s system in this point amounts to the same as mine.  Even if the effect were assumed to be greater, but the process less simple, I think one might say that, when all is said and done, the effect itself would be less great, taking into account not only the final effect but also the mediate effect.  For the wisest mind so acts, as far as it is possible, that the means are also in a sense ends, that is, they are desirable not only on account of what they do, but on account of what they are.  The more intricate processes take up too much ground, too much space, too much place, too much time that might have been better employed.

[258] 209.  Now since everything resolves itself into this greatest perfection, we return to my law of the best.  For perfection includes not only the moral good and the physical good of intelligent creatures, but also the good which is purely metaphysical, and concerns also creatures devoid of reason.  It follows that the evil that is in rational creatures happens only by concomitance, not by antecedent will but by a consequent will, as being involved in the best possible plan; and the metaphysical good which includes everything makes it necessary sometimes to admit physical evil and moral evil, as I have already explained more than once.  It so happens that the ancient Stoics were not far removed from this system.  M. Bayle remarked upon this himself in his Dictionary in the article on ‘Chrysippus’, rem.  T. It is of importance to give his own words, in order sometimes to face him with his own objections and to bring him back to the fine sentiments that he had formerly pronounced:  ‘Chrysippus’, he says (p. 930), ’in his work on Providence examined amongst other questions this one:  Did the nature of things, or the providence that made the world and the human kind, make also the diseases to which men are subject?  He answers that the chief design of Nature was not to make them sickly, that would not be in keeping with the cause of all