this Nature must forgive him his errors, since she herself was their cause.  But the nature of things, if taken as without intelligence and without choice, has in it nothing sufficiently determinant.  Herr Becher did not sufficiently take into account that the Author of things (natura naturans) must be good and wise, and that we can be evil without complicity on his part in our acts of wickedness.  When a wicked man exists, God must have found in the region of possibles the idea of such a man forming part of that sequence of things, the choice of which was demanded by the greatest perfection of the universe, and in which errors and sins are not only punished but even repaired to greater advantage, so that they contribute to the greatest good.

351.  M. Bayle, however, has extended the free choice of God a little too far.  Speaking of the Peripatetic Strato (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol.  III, ch. 180, p. 1239), who asserted that everything had been brought forth by the necessity of a nature devoid of intelligence, he maintains that this philosopher, on being asked why a tree has not the power to form bones and veins, might have asked in his turn:  Why has matter precisely three dimensions? why should not two have sufficed for it? why has it not four?  ’If one had answered that there can be neither more nor less than three dimensions he would have demanded the cause of this impossibility.’  These words lead one to believe that M. Bayle suspected that the number of the dimensions of matter depended upon God’s choice, even as it depended upon him to cause or not to cause trees to produce animals.  Indeed, how do we know whether there are not planetary globes or earths situated in some more remote place in the universe where the fable of the Barnacle-geese of Scotland (birds that were said to be born of trees) proves true, and even whether there are not countries where one could say: 

  _... populos umbrosa creavit_
  Fraxinus, et foeta viridis puer excidit alno?

But with the dimensions of matter it is not thus:  the ternary number is determined for it not by the reason of the best, but by a geometrical necessity, because the geometricians have been able to prove that there are only three straight lines perpendicular to one another which can intersect at one and the same point.  Nothing more appropriate could have been [336] chosen to show the difference there is between the moral necessity that accounts for the choice of wisdom and the brute necessity of Strato and the adherents of Spinoza, who deny to God understanding and will, than a consideration of the difference existing between the reason for the laws of motion and the reason for the ternary number of the dimensions:  for the first lies in the choice of the best and the second in a geometrical and blind necessity.