be punished.  Chrysippus answers that evil springs from the original constitution of souls, which forms part of the destined sequence; that souls which are of a good natural disposition offer stronger resistance to the impressions of external causes; but that those whose natural defects had not been corrected by discipline allowed themselves to be perverted.  Next he distinguishes (according to Cicero) between principal causes and accessary causes, and uses the comparison of a cylinder, whose rotatory force and speed or ease in motion comes chiefly from its shape, whereas it would be retarded by any roughness in formation.  Nevertheless it has need of impulsion, even as the soul needs to be acted upon by the objects of the senses, and receives this impression according to its own constitution.

333.  Cicero considers that Chrysippus becomes so confused that, whether he will or no, he confirms the necessity of fate.  M. Bayle is almost of the same opinion (Dictionary, art.  ‘Chrysippus’, lit.  H).  He says that this philosopher does not get out of the bog, since the cylinder is regular or uneven according to what the craftsman has made it; and thus God, providence, fate will be the causes of evil in such a way as to render it necessary.  Justus Lipsius answers that, according to the Stoics, evil came from matter.  That is (to my mind) as if he had said that the stone on which the craftsman worked was sometimes too rough and too irregular to produce a good cylinder.  M. Bayle cites against Chrysippus the fragments of Onomaus and Diogenianus that Eusebius has preserved for us in the Praeparatio[326] Evangelica (lib. 6, c. 7, 8); and above all he relies upon Plutarch’s refutation in his book against the Stoics, quoted art.  ‘Paulicians’, lit.  G. But this refutation does not amount to very much.  Plutarch maintains that it would be better to deny power to God than to impute to him the permission of evils; and he will not admit that evil may serve a greater good.  I have already shown, on the contrary, that God cannot but be all-powerful, even though he can do no better than produce the best, which includes the permission of evil.  Moreover, I have pointed out repeatedly that what is to the disadvantage of a part taken separately may serve the perfection of the whole.

334.  Chrysippus had already made an observation to this effect, not only in his fourth book on Providence, as given by Aulus Gellius (lib. 6, c. 1) where he asserts that evil serves to bring the good to notice (a reason which is not sufficient here), but still better when he applies the comparison of a stage play, in his second book on Nature (as Plutarch quotes it himself).  There he says that there are sometimes portions in a comedy which are of no worth in themselves and which nevertheless lend grace to the whole poem.  He calls these portions epigrams or inscriptions.  We have not enough acquaintance with the nature of the ancient comedy for full understanding of this