Si Pergama dextra
  Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

He gives it the best possible turn, and only shows it on its good side.  He knows how to strip spontaneity and reason of their advantages, [408] transferring all these to vague indifference:  only through this indifference is one active, resisting the passions, taking pleasure in one’s choice, or being happy; it appears indeed that one would be miserable if some happy necessity should oblige us to choose aright.  Our author had said admirable things on the origin and reasons of natural evils:  he only had to apply the same principles to moral evil; indeed, he believes himself that moral evil becomes an evil through the physical evils that it causes or tends to cause.  But somehow or other he thinks that it would be a degradation of God and men if they were to be made subject to reason; that thus they would all be rendered passive to it and would no longer be satisfied with themselves; in short that men would have nothing wherewith to oppose the misfortunes that come to them from without, if they had not within them this admirable privilege of rendering things good or tolerable by choosing them, and of changing all into gold by the touch of this wondrous faculty.

4.  We will examine it in closer detail presently; but it will be well to profit beforehand by the excellent ideas of our author on the nature of things and on natural evils, particularly since there are some points in which we shall be able to go a little further:  by this means also we shall gain a better understanding of the whole arrangement of his system.  The first chapter contains the principles.  The writer calls substance a being the idea of which does not involve the existence of another.  I do not know if there are any such among created beings, by reason of the connexion existing between all things; and the example of a wax torch is not the example of a substance, any more than that of a swarm of bees would be.  But one may take the terms in an extended sense.  He observes aptly that after all the changes of matter and after all the qualities of which it may be divested, there remain extension, mobility, divisibility and resistance.  He explains also the nature of notions, and leaves it to be understood that universals indicate only the resemblances which exist between individuals; that we understand by ideas only that which is known through an immediate sensation, and that the rest is known to us only through relations with these ideas.  But when he admits that we have no idea of God, of spirit, of substance, he does not appear to have observed sufficiently that we have immediate apperception of substance and of spirit in our apperception of ourselves, and that the idea of God is found in[409] the idea of ourselves through a suppression of the limits of our perfections, as extension taken in an absolute sense is comprised in the idea of a globe.  He is right also in asserting