343.  There is also nothing to preclude the existence in the universe of animals resembling that one which Cyrano de Bergerac encountered in the sun.  The body of this animal being a sort of fluid composed of innumerable small animals, that were capable of ranging themselves in accordance with the desires of the great animal, by this means it transformed itself in a moment, just as it pleased; and the dissolution of continuity caused it no more hurt than the stroke of an oar can cause to the sea.  But, after all, these animals are not men, they are not in our globe or in our present century; and God’s plan ensured that there should not be lacking here on earth a rational animal clothed in flesh and bones, whose structure involves susceptibility to pain.

344.  But M. Bayle further opposes this on another principle, one which I have already mentioned.  It seems that he thinks the ideas which the soul conceives in relation to the feelings of the body are arbitrary.  Thus God might have caused the dissolution of continuity to give us pleasure.  He even maintains that the laws of motion are entirely arbitrary.  ’I would wish to know’, he says (vol.  III, ch. 166, p. 1080), ’whether God established by an act of his freedom of indifference general laws on the communication of movements, and the particular laws on the union of the human soul with an organic body?  In this case, he could have established quite different laws, and adopted a system whose results involved neither moral evil nor physical evil.  But if the answer is given that God was constrained by supreme wisdom to establish the laws that he has established, there we have neither more nor less than the Fatum of [332] the Stoics.  Wisdom will have marked out a way for God, the abandonment whereof will have been as impossible to him as his own self-destruction.’  This objection has been sufficiently overthrown:  it is only a moral necessity; and it is always a happy necessity to be bound to act in accordance with the rules of perfect wisdom.

345.  Moreover, it appears to me that the reason for the belief held by many that the laws of motion are arbitrary comes from the fact that few people have properly examined them.  It is known now that M. Descartes was much mistaken in his statement of them.  I have proved conclusively that conservation of the same quantity of motion cannot occur, but I consider that the same quantity of force is conserved, whether absolute or directive and respective, whether total or partial.  My principles, which carry this subject as far as it can go, have not yet been published in full; but I have communicated them to friends competent to judge of them, who have approved them, and have converted some other persons of acknowledged erudition and ability.  I discovered at the same time that the laws of motion actually existing in Nature, and confirmed by experiments, are not in reality absolutely demonstrable, as a geometrical proposition would be;