Manichaeism is an heretical sect founded by a certain Mani, Persian by nation, and of very low birth. He drew most of his dogmas from the books of an Arab named Scythianus. This sect began in the third century, became established in several provinces, and subsisted for a very long time. Its weakness consisted less in the dogma of two principles, one good and the other evil, than in the particular explanations it gave of them, and in the practical consequences it drew from them. You can see this in abbé Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History , [1] in the article Manichaeans in Bayle’s Dictionary , [2] and in M. de Meaux’s History of the variations . [3]

The doctrine of the two principles is much older than Mani. The Gnostics, the Cerdonians the Marcionites, and several other sectarians introduced it into Christianity before Mani had been heard of. They were not even the first writers: we have to go back to the earliest antiquity of paganism to find its origin. If we are to believe Plutarch, this dogma is very ancient. It was soon communicated to every nation on earth, and imprinted so deeply in their hearts that nothing could dislodge it. Prayers, sacrifices, ceremonies, public and secret details of religion, were all marked by it among the barbarians and the Greeks. It appears that Plutarch makes it too extensive. It is indeed true that the pagans recognized and honored malevolent gods, but they also taught that the same god who sometimes shed his blessings on a people afflicted it sometime later to avenge some offense. It suffices to read the Greek authors to see this manifestly. We can say the same about Rome. Read Livy, Cicero, and the other Latin writers, and you will clearly understand that the same Jupiter to whom sacrifices were offered for a victory won was honored on other occasions so he would cease afflicting the Roman people. Do not all the poets represent him to us armed with lightning, and thundering from on high to intimidate feeble mortals? Plutarch is also mistaken when he has the philosophers and poets in agreement on the doctrine of the two principles. Did he not remember Homer, the prince of poets, their model and common source; Homer, I say, who proposed only one god with two barrels of good and evil? That father of poets imagines that there are two barrels before Jupiter’s palace, from which the god continually draws the goods and evils he sheds on humankind. That is his principal function. Still, if he drew from them equally, and never made a mistake, we would complain less of our fate.

Zoroaster, whom the Persians and Chaldeans recognized as their founder, had not failed to teach them this doctrine. The benevolent principle they called Oromazes , and the malevolent one Arimanius . According to him, the first was like light and the second like darkness.

All the followers of the system of two principles believed they were uncreated, contemporary, and independent of each other, with equal strength and equal power. Nevertheless, some Persians, to go by Mr. Hyde, [4] who got it from Plutarch, maintained that the evil principle had been produced by the good one, since one day he was to be annihilated. The first enemies of Christianity, such as Celsus, Cresconius, and Porphyry, boasted of having discovered some traces of that system in Holy Scripture, which speaks of the demon and the traps he set for the Son of God, [5] and the trouble he takes to disrupt his power. But it was easy to answer such reproaches. Silence was imposed on vain men who, to discredit what they never understood, took many allegorical things at face value.

Whatever terrain this system of two principles has occupied, it does not appear, as I have observed, that the Greeks and Romans appropriated it to themselves. Their Pluto cannot be regarded as the evil principle. In their theology he had no other purpose than to preside over the assembly of the dead, without authority over the living. The other infernal deities, malfeasant, sad, and jealous of our repose, also had nothing in common with the evil principle, since the only evil all those deities subordinate to Jupiter could do was what he allowed them to do. They were to paganism what our demons are to Christianity.

What gave rise to the dogma of the two principles is the difficulty of explaining the origin of moral and physical suffering. It must be admitted that of all the questions that challenge the mind, it is the hardest and most thorny. There is no solution to be found except in the faith that teaches us the fall of the first man, from which followed both his damnation and that of all his posterity. But the pagans lacked supernatural assistance; they consequently found themselves in very narrow and troubling straits. God’s goodness and holiness had to be reconciled with man’s sin and various miseries; he who can do anything had to be justified for the fact that, able to prevent evil, he preferred it to the good itself, and that, being infinitely equitable, he punishes creatures who seem not to have deserved it, and who are born several centuries after their condemnation has been pronounced. To escape this labyrinth, where their reason only went awry, the Greek philosophers had recourse to individual hypotheses. Some supposed the pre-existence of souls, and maintained that they came to inhabit bodies only to expiate the faults committed in the course of another life. Plato attributes the origin of this hypothesis to Orpheus, who had himself taken it from the Egyptians. Others robbed God of all knowledge of sublunary matters, persuaded that they are too incompatible to have been determined by a beneficent hand. From this they drew the conclusion that we must give up on the idea of a just, pure, and holy being, or else concede that he takes no part in whatever takes place on earth. Others established a succession of events, a chain of beings and evils that nothing can alter or break. What use is it to complain, they said, and what use to grumble? Destiny commands everything; destiny manipulates everything blindly, once and for all. Moral evil is not less indispensable than physical evil; both rightly enter into nature’s plan. Others, finally, displeased with all these various explanations for the origin of moral and physical evil, sought the solution in the system of two principles. When it comes to explaining the various phenomena of corrupted nature, there is initially something plausible about it; but if one considers it in itself, nothing is more monstrous. Indeed, it takes advantage of a supposition that is repugnant to all our clearest ideas, whereas the system of Christians is based on just those notions. By this remark alone the superiority of Christians over Manichaeans is decided; for all who know something about reasoning are in agreement that a system is much more imperfect when it lacks conformity with the first principles than when it cannot rationalize natural phenomena. If someone builds on an absurd, confused, and unlikely supposition, that cannot be remedied by the successful explanation of phenomena; but if it does not explain all of them satisfactorily, that is compensated for by clarity, by plausibility, and by the conformity it is found to have with laws and ideas of order; and because of that imperfection, those who have embraced it are not commonly deterred, under pretext that they cannot give a reason for all experiences. They impute this flaw to the limits of their minds. It was objected to Copernicus, when he proposed his system, that Mars and Venus should at some point appear much larger by several diameters because they came closer to the earth. That consequence was necessary, and yet none of that could be seen. Although he did not know how to respond, that did not make him ready to abandon it. He simply said that time would make it known. This reason was taken as a defeat, and the opposition seemed to be right; but telescopes having been found subsequently, they saw that the very thing that was put to him as a major objection was the confirmation of his system and the overturning of Ptolemy’s.

Here are a few of the reasons that can be proposed against Manichaeism . I shall take them from M. Bayle himself, whom we know to have used all the power of his mind to lend to this unfortunate hypothesis an appearance of plausibility.

1. That opinion is absolutely insulting to the god they call good. It takes away at least half his power, and makes him timid, unjust, imprudent, and ignorant. His fear of his enemy’s incursion, they say, led him to abandon some souls to him in order to save the rest. The souls were portions and members of his substance, and had committed no sin. There was therefore injustice on his part to treat them in such a way, principally seeing that they would be tormented, and that should they be in any way besmirched they were to remain eternally in the power of evil. Thus the good principle could not balance its interests; it had exposed itself to an eternal and irreparable mutilation. Moreover, his fear had been ill-founded; for since from all eternity the estates of evil were separated from the estates of good, there was no reason to fear that evil would make an incursion into its enemy’s territory. Moreover, they give less foresight and power to the good principle than to the bad. The good principle had not foreseen the misfortune of the detachments he exposed to the assaults of the enemy, but the evil principle had very well known what the detachments would be that would be sent against him, and had prepared the necessary machines to remove them. The good principle was simple enough to prefer his own mutilation to receiving the detachments of the enemy on his territory, who thereby would have lost a part of his members. The evil principle had always been superior; it had lost nothing, and had made conquests it had kept; but the good principle had voluntarily yielded many things out of timidity, injustice, and imprudence. Thus, by refusing to recognize God as the creator of evil, he is made to be evil in every way.

2. The doctrine of the Manichaeans is the sponge of all religions, since reasoning consistently they can expect nothing from their prayers, nor fear anything from their impiety. They must be persuaded that whatever they do, the good god will always be propitious to them, and the evil god always contrary. They are two gods, one of whom can do nothing but good, and the other nothing but evil; they are thus determined by their nature, and follow, to the full extent of their strength, that determination.

3. If we consult the ideas of order, we will see very clearly that unity, infinite power, and happiness belong to the creator of the world. The necessity of nature has required that there be causes for all effects. It was thus necessary that there be a force sufficient for the production of the world. Now it is much more consonant with order that such power be combined in a single subject than if it were divided into two or three, or a hundred thousand. Let us then conclude that it has not been divided, and that it resides entirely in a single nature, and that there are therefore not two first principles but just one. There would be as good a reason for allowing an infinite number, as some have done, as to allow only two. If it is counter to order for the power of nature to be divided between two subjects, how much more strange that those two subjects be enemies. From that could only come all sorts of confusion. What one would wish to do, the other would wish to undo, and thus nothing would get done; or if something got done, it would be a very strange piece of work, and very far from the precision of this universe. If Manichaeism had allowed two principles that acted in concert, it would have been exposed to less severe drawbacks; it would nonetheless have shocked the idea of order with relation to the rule that one not multiply beings unnecessarily; for if there are two first principles, they each have the power necessary for the production of the universe, or they do not. If they have it, one of them is superfluous; if they do not, that force was divided needlessly, and it would have made much more sense to combine it into a single subject and it would have been more active. Not to mention that it is not easy to understand how a cause that exists by itself should have only a share of force. What would have limited it to just so many degrees? It depends on nothing, and draws everything from within itself. But without insisting too much on this reason, which is held to be solid in the schools, I ask whether the power to do everything he wants is not essentially contained in the idea of God. Reason tells me that the idea of God contains no attribute with more distinctness and clarity than the power to do what he wishes. That is what makes for beatitude. But in the opinion of the Manichaeans, God would not have the power to do what he most intently desires; therefore, he would not be happy. The nature of the good principle, they say, is such that it can produce only good, and that it opposes with all its forces the introduction of evil. He therefore wills, and wishes with the greatest ardor that there be no evil; he has done everything he could to prevent that disorder. Therefore, if then he lacked the power necessary to prevent it, his most ardent desires have been frustrated, and consequently his happiness has been troubled and disrupted; he therefore does not have the power he ought to have according to the constitution of his being. Now what could any say more absurd than that? Is that not a dogma that implies contradiction? The Manichaeans’ two principles would be the most unhappy of all beings. The good principle could not cast his eyes on the world without their being offended by an infinite number of crimes and disorders, of sufferings and pains that cover the face of the earth. The evil principle would not be less afflicted by the spectacle of virtues and good things. In their pain, they must feel unfortunate at being immortal.

4. Finally, I ask the Manichaeans, was the soul that does a good deed created by the good principle, or by the evil one? If it was created by the evil principle, it follows that good can arise from the source of all evil. If it was by the good principle, evil, for the same reason, can arise from the source of all good, for this same soul in other situations commits crimes. So you are reduced to reversing your own arguments, and maintaining, against what you feel, that the soul that does a good deed is never the same one that sins. To obviate this difficulty, they would need to assume three first principles: one essentially good, and the cause of all good; one essentially bad, and the cause of all evil; one essentially capable of good and evil, and purely passive. After which we would have to say that the soul of man is made from this third principle, and sometimes does a good deed, and sometimes a bad one, depending on whether it receives the influence of the good principle or the bad. Nothing then is more absurd or more foolish than the two principles of the Manichaeans.

I am leaving aside several other reasons by which I could attack the weak points of this extravagant system. I do not mean to exploit the palpable absurdities which the Manichaeans advanced when they descended into the detail to explain their dogma. They are so pitiful that just to report them simply is to refute them sufficiently. From the fragments of their system which one encounters here and there in the Fathers, it appears that this sect was not blessed in hypotheses. Their first supposition is false, as we have just proven; but it got worse in their hands from the awkwardness and lack of philosophical spirit with which they explained it. They did not sufficiently realize their advantages, according to Mr. Bayle, nor were they able to make use of the main machine, which was the difficulty over the origin of evil. He imagines that an able man of their party, a Descartes, for example, would have put the orthodox in quite a quandary, and it seems that he himself, for want of another, was ready to take on this function, so needless in the judgment of many. All the hypotheses which the Christians have established, he says, poorly repel the blows they receive; they all triumph when they act on offense, but lose their whole advantage when they must sustain the attack. He admits that the dualists , as Mr. Hyde calls them, would have been put to flight by a priori reasons derived from the nature of God; but he imagines they in turn win out when it comes to the a posteriori reasons derived from the existence of evil. It must be admitted that M. Bayle, by excepting Manichaeism from the gross errors of its early defenders, has made a system of it which in his hands seems armed with a new strength it did not used to have. The objections he has sown in various parts of his works have seemed so strong to him and so triumphant that he has not feared to say that reason will succumb under their weight any time it undertakes to answer them. Reason, according to him, is a principle of destruction, and not of edification; it is good only for forming doubts, perpetuating disputes, and making man cognizant of his flaws, his powerlessness, and the necessity of a revelation; and that revelation is that of Scripture. That is where we find the means of invincibly refuting the hypothesis of the two principles and all the objections of the Manichaeans; there we find the unity of God and his infinite perfections, the fall of the first man, and its baleful consequences.

As M. Bayle is not a common antagonist, the most learned pens of Europe have tried their hand at refuting him. Among this great number of authors we can count M. Jaquelot, M. le Clerc, and M. Leibniz.  [6] Let us begin with M. Jaquelot, and see whether in this dispute he had an advantage.

Mr. Jaquelot assumes as principle that man’s freedom can resolve all of M. Bayle’s difficulties. God having formed this universe for his glory, in other words to receive from his creatures the worship and obedience due him, the free being was alone able to contribute to this design of the creator. The worship of a creature that was not free would contribute no more to the creator’s glory than a machine with a human face which would kneel down thanks to its springs. God loves holiness, but what virtue would there be if man were determined by his nature to follow the good, as fire is determined to burn? There could therefore be but one creature that could fulfill God’s design. Thus, although a free creature could abuse its free will, a free being was nevertheless something so exalted and so venerable that its excellence and its worth greatly outweighed all the most woeful consequences that the abuse he would make of it could produce. A world full of virtues, but without freedom, is much more imperfect than one where freedom reigns, although it brings many disorders in its wake. M. Bayle reverses this whole argument by the simple consideration that if one of the most sublime of God’s perfections is to be so determined for the love of good that it implies contradiction if he could not love it, a creature determined for the good would better conform to the nature of God, and consequently be more perfect, than a creature who has an equal power to love crime and to hate it. Never is one more free than when one is fixed in the good. It is not freedom to be able to sin. That unfortunate power is its abuse and not its perfection. The more excellent a gift of God freedom is, the more it must bear the features of his goodness. It is therefore inappropriate, concludes M. Bayle, to cite freedom here to explain the origin of evil. One could have answered him that God is not obliged to endow us with a freedom that never inclined toward evil; that he can hold it [freedom] constantly to duty only by granting it corresponding graces whose salutary breeze carries us to the port of salvation. I admit, M. Bayle said, that he did not owe us such perfect freedom; but he owed it to himself to prevent all the disorders which the abuse of freedom produces; his goodness, his wisdom, and even more his holiness, made this a law for him. Now given this, how can we reconcile the fall of the first man with all these attributes? By what strange fatality did this precious freedom, the token of divine love, produce, beginning with its first test, both the crime and misery that follow them, and this before the eyes of an infinitely good, infinitely holy, and infinitely powerful God? Was it for this that the freedom that could be constantly and invariably directed toward the good without losing its nature had been given?

M. Jaquelot does not stop at freedom alone to explain the origin of evil; he also seeks its solution in the interest, and the wisdom, and the glory of God. His wisdom and his glory having determined him to make free creatures, that powerful reason must have won out over the possibly woeful consequences which freedom given to men could have. All the drawbacks of freedom were unable to counterbalance the reasons drawn from his wisdom, his power, and his glory. God created free beings for his glory. Therefore, as God’s designs work only for his glory, and there is additionally a greater harvest of glory in the direction of free agents who abuse their freedom than in the direction of an always virtuous humankind, the allowance of sin and the sequels of sin are very much in keeping with divine wisdom. This reason of glory seems to M. Jaquelot an impenetrable shield to parry all the blows of Manichaeism . He finds it more powerful than all the difficulties raised against it, because it derives immediately from the glory of the creator. M. Bayle cannot stand this expression: that God works only for his glory . He cannot comprehend how the infinite being, who finds in his own perfections a glory and a beatitude as incapable of decrease as of increase, can have as his purpose, in producing creatures, some gain in glory. God is indeed superior to all that is called desire of praise , desire of reputation . It thus appears that there can be in him no other reason for creating the world than his goodness. But, says M. Bayle, if motives of glory determined him to it, he seems he would rather choose the glory of maintaining virtue and happiness among men to that of showing that by skill and infinite ability he manages to preserve human society, despite confusions and disorders, from the crimes and miseries it is filled with; that in the truth a great monarch can deem himself happy when, against his intention and improperly, the rebellion of his subjects and the caprice of his neighbors have brought on him civil and foreign wars which have furnished him opportunities to make his valor and prudence shine; that by dissipating all his tempests he acquires a greater name and makes himself more admired, than by a peaceful reign. But if, lest fear that his courage and the great talents of his policies remain unknown for want of opportunities, he skillfully brought about a combination of circumstances in which he were persuaded that his subjects would revolt and that his neighbors, devoured with jealousy, would make a league against him, he would aspire to a glory unworthy of an upright man, and would have no taste for real glory; for it consists much more in bringing a reign of peace, abundance, and moral behavior than in making known to the public that he has the skill to rein in seditions or to repel and dissipate powerful and formidable leagues that have been fomented under his hand. In a word, it seems that if God governed the world by a principle of love for the creature he made in his image, there would be no want of opportunities just as favorable as the ones being alleged to manifest his infinite perfections, seeing as, his knowledge and his power having no limits, equally good means of attaining his ends cannot be limited to a small number. But it seems to some people, M. Bayle observes, that an innocent humankind would not have been so problematic to conduct, to merit that God should play a role. The scene would have been so smooth, so simple, so uncomplicated, that it would not have been worth making providence intervene. An eternal springtime, a fertile, uncultivated land, peace, and the concord of the animals and the elements, and all the rest of the description of the golden age, were not things where the divine art could have found a noble enough exercise; it is only in the tempests and amidst shipwrecks that the pilot’s ability appears.

M. Leibniz went looking for the solution to all these difficulties in the finest, the most regulated, in sum, the best system in the world, and the most worthy of the grandeur and wisdom of the supreme being. But to understand it rightly, we must observe that the best consists not in the perfection of a part of the whole, but in the best of everything taken globally. A painting, for example, is marvelous for the naturalness of the flesh tones: this particular merit honors the hand that made it; but the painting in every other way wants coherence, regular attitudes, energy, pleasantness. Nothing about it is living or passionate; one sees it without emotion, without interest; the work will be at best average. Another painting has slight imperfections. One sees in the distance some incidental character whose hand is not properly articulated; but the rest is artful, everything in it speaks, moves, breathes; the design is correct, the action is sustained, all the traits are elegant. Does anyone hesitate over the preference? No doubt, no one does. The first painter is but a pupil who wants genius; the other is a bold master whose learned hand quickly finds the perfection of the whole at the expense of an irregularity which to correct would retard the enthusiasm that moves him.

Maintaining all proportions, the same applies with respect to God in the choice of possible worlds. Some would have been free from the defects found in ours; but ours with its flaws is more perfect than the others, which in their constitution entailed greater irregularities combined with lesser beauties. The infinitely wise being to whom the best is a law had then to prefer the admirable production allied with some vices to the production detached from crimes but less happy, less fecund, less rich, less lovely all around. For as the lesser evil is a sort of good, likewise a lesser good is a sort of evil if it is an obstacle to a greater good; and there would be something to correct in the acts of God if there were a way to do better.

One might say that the world could have been without sin and without sufferings, but then it would not have been the best. The goodness of God would have shone more in such a world, but his wisdom would have been belied; and as one of his attributes ought not to be sacrificed to the other, it was right that God’s goodness for men be tempered by his wisdom. If someone alleges experience to prove that God could have done better, he affects the role of foolish censor of his works. What? one could reply to him, You have known the world for only three days, and you find things to criticize! Wait until you know it better, and consider especially those parts that present a complete whole, such as organic bodies, and you will find in them an artfulness and beauty well beyond your imagination. The flaw is in some part of the whole, this I do not deny; but in order to judge a work, is it not the whole that must be taken into account? There are imperfect and shapeless lines in the Iliad : is it for that less of a masterpiece of the art? It is the totality, the ensemble, so to speak, that decides perfection or imperfection. Now the universe considered in this vast generality is of all possible ones the most regular. This totality of which I speak is not an effect, as one might imagine; it is the mass alone of the beings and revolutions which the globe that includes me contains; the universe is not restrained within such short limits. In order to form a philosophical notion of it, you must lift your eyes higher and farther. My senses see distinctly but a feeble portion of the earth, and the earth itself is but one of our sun’s planets, which in turn is but the center of a particular vortex, [7] each fixed star having the same advantage. Whoever envisages the universe under a more shrunken image knows nothing of God’s handiwork; he is like an infant who believes everything is contained in the small cradle where his eyes begin to open. The man who thinks puts his reason in the place of his eyes; his mind goes where his gaze cannot penetrate. He walks in this immense expanse, to return afterwards with humility and surprise at his own insignificance, and to admire the creator whose inexhaustible fecundity has given birth to this universe and varied the pomp of the ornaments which nature there displays.

Perhaps someone will say that it is impossible to produce the best, because there is no creature, however perfect we suppose it to be, that an even more perfect one cannot be produced. I answer that what can be said of a creature or a particular substance that can always be surpassed by another, ought not to be applied to the universe, which having to prolong itself for all future eternity, is in a sense infinite. So it is not about a creature, but the entire universe, and the adversary will be obliged to argue that a possible universe can be better than the other forever: but that is something he can never prove. If that opinion were true, God would have produced none, for he is incapable of acting against reason, and that would be acting against reason. It is as if one imagined that God had imagined making a material sphere without there being any reason to make it of such size. That decree would be futile; it would bear in itself what would prevent its effect.

But if God always produces the best, he will produce other gods; otherwise every substance he produced would not be the best or the most perfect. But it is a mistake not to consider the order and connections of things. If every substance taken separately were perfect, they would all be alike, which is neither suitable nor possible. If it were gods, it would not have been possible to produce them. The best system of things would therefore contain no gods; it will always be a system of bodies, that is, bodies organized according to places and times, and of souls that oversee and govern them. It is easy to conceive that a structure of the universe can be the best of all without its becoming a god. The connection and order of things makes it so the body of every animal and every plant comes from other animals and other plants. One body serves another; thus their perfection could not be equal. Everyone will agree, no doubt, that a world that includes the material and the spiritual together is much more perfect than if it contained only spirits detached from any matter. One does not prevent the other; it is one more perfection. Now would one wish, for the perfection of this world, for all the bodies in it to be equal in beauty? The world can be compared to a building of admirable structure. Now in a building there must be not only apartments, rooms, galleries, and gardens, but also a kitchen, a cellar, a farmyard, stables, sewers, etc. Thus it would not have been appropriate to make nothing but suns in the world, or to make a world that is all gold and diamonds, but which would not have been habitable. If man had been only eyes or ears, he could not have eaten. If God had made him without passion, he would have made him stupid, and if he had wished to make him without fault, he would have had to deprive him of his senses, or make him sense otherwise than by his organs; in other words, there would not have been man.

I grant you, you will say, that among all possible worlds there is one which is the best of all; but how will you prove to me that God gave it the preference over all the others which like it had a claim to exist? I will prove it by the reason of order that would have the best preferred to the less good. To do less good than one can is to slight wisdom or goodness. Thus, to ask whether God could make things better than he did is to call into question whether the acts of God accord with the most perfect wisdom and the greatest goodness. Who can doubt that? But in allowing this principle, here are the two consequences that result from it. The first is that God was not free in the creation of the universe; that the choice of this one among all those possible was the effect of an insurmountable necessity; that in short what is done is produced by the impulsion of a fatality superior to the deity itself. The second consequence is that all effects are necessary and inevitable, and that in nature as it is, nothing can exist in it but what is there, and as it is; that the universe once chosen goes on its own, without allowing itself to bend to our just complaints or to the sad voice of our tears.

I admit that this is the weak point of the Leibnizian system. By seeming to avoid the pitfall where his system led him, the philosopher only ensconced himself deeper. The freedom he gives God, and which seems to him highly compatible with the plan of the best world, is a genuine necessity, despite the mitigations and corrections by which he tries to temper the austerity of his hypothesis. Father Malebranche, [8] who is no less a partisan of optimism than M. Leibniz, managed to avoid the reef on which the latter washed up. Persuaded that the essence of freedom consists in indifference, he argues that God was indifferent about decreeing the creation of the world, so that the necessity of creating the most perfect world would have been a genuine necessity, and consequently would have destroyed freedom if it had not been preceded by a decree that emanated from indifference itself, and which rendered it hypothetical. “We must take care,” he says in his Traité de la nature et de la grâce [Treatise on Nature and Grace], [9] “that although God follows the rules which his wisdom prescribed for him, he does not necessarily do what is best, because he can choose to do nothing. To act and not follow exactly the rules of wisdom is a flaw. Thus, supposing that God acts, he necessarily acts in the wisest manner conceivable. But being free in the production of the world is a mark of abundance, of plenitude, of self-sufficiency. It is better for the world to be than not to be. The incarnation of Jesus Christ makes the work worthy of its creator; but as God is essentially happy and perfect, as he alone is well-off with respect to himself, or the cause of his perfection and his happiness, he loves invincibly only his own substance; and all that is outside God must be produced by an act that is eternal and immutable, in truth, but which derives its necessity only from the supposition of divine decrees.”

There are some who go farther than Father Malebranche, and give more extension to God’s freedom. They want not only for God to have been able not to produce the world, but also for him to have chosen freely, among the degrees of possible good and perfection, the degree he wished; for him to have deemed best to halt at that point the exercise of his infinite power, by bringing out of nothing, some precise number of creatures endowed with a particular degree of perfection, and capable of a particular measure of happiness. Whatever system you adopt, whether you say God’s wisdom made it a law for him to create the most perfect world possible, and that it merely fettered his freedom, assuming he once had decided to create; or you maintain that his sovereign freedom put on created things the limits he wished, one can resolve the difficulties that are raised over the existence of evil. Do you say that God was perfectly free in the limits he placed on the perfections of his creatures? Then he could give them a flexible freedom for good and evil. Whence the origin of moral evil, physical evil, and metaphysical evil. Metaphysical evil will find its source in the original limitation of creatures; moral evil in the abuse of freedom; and physical evil in the pains and sufferings that will be either an effect of the punishment of sin, or a consequence of the natural constitution of bodies. Are you content with the best of all possible worlds? [10] Then you conceive that, all the evils that seem to disfigure the universe [11] being tied to the plan of the best world, God ought not to have chosen a less perfect one, because of the disadvantages that certain creatures would experience. These disadvantages are the ingredients of the most perfect world. They are a necessary sequel of the rules of convenience, proportion, and relation, which an infinite wisdom never fails to follow to reach the end which its goodness intends, namely the greatest total good of this assemblage of creatures it has produced. To want all evil to have been excluded from nature is to claim that God’s goodness had to exclude all regularity, all order, and all proportion in his handiwork, or, which comes to the same thing, that God could not be infinitely good without casting off his wisdom. To suppose a world composed of the same beings we see, the parts of which would be tied in an advantageous manner to the whole, without any admixture of evil, is to suppose a chimaera.

M. Bayle is surely mistaken when he maintains that this goodness, which is makes up the character of the deity, must act to infinity to prevent all evil and produce all good. A being who is good, and only that, a being who acts only through that single attribute, is a contradictory being, far from being the perfect one. The perfect being includes all the perfections of his essence; he is infinite by the assemblage of all of them together, as well as by the degree to which he possesses each of them. If he is infinitely good, he is also infinitely wise, infinitely free.

Metaphysical evils are insulting to the wisdom and power of God; physical evils offend his goodness; moral evils tarnish the brilliance of his holiness. That is, in part, what all of M. Bayle’s arguments reduce to; assuredly he overdoes things. We grant that some vices were tied to the best plan for the universe; but we do not grant him that they are contrary to his divine attributes. This objection would obtain if there were no virtue, and vice held its place throughout. He will doubtless say that it is enough that vice prevails, and that virtue is a small thing in comparison. But that, I will surely not grant him, and I believe that indeed, rightly gauged, there is incomparably more moral good than moral evil in reasoning creatures, of which we know but a very small number. This evil is not even so great in men as it is said. It is only people who are naturally wicked, or who have become somewhat somber and misanthropic through misfortunes, like Lucian’s Timon, [12] who find wickedness everywhere that poisons all the best deeds with the sinister interpretation they give to them, and whose bitter bile sheds on virtue the purest of the odious colors of vice. There are persons who apply themselves to making us perceive crimes where we see only virtues, and this to show how sharp their minds are. Tacitus has been criticized for that, and M. de la Rochefoucauld, and the book of abbé Esprit dealing with the falsity of human virtues. [13] But let us assume that vice exceeds virtue in humankind, as one assumes that the number of the damned exceeds that of the elect, in no way does it follow that vice and misery exceed virtue and felicity in the universe. One must rather judge quite the opposite, because the city of God must be the most perfect of all possible states, since it was formed and is still governed by the greatest and best of all monarchs. The universe is not contained in planet earth alone. Nay, this earth which we inhabit, compared with the universe, is lost and almost invisible amidst nothingness. Even if I did not already know by revelation that there are created intelligences, as different among themselves in their natures as they are from me, would my reason not lead me to believe that the region of reasoning substances is perhaps as varied in its species as matter is in its parts? What, this matter, base and dead in itself, received a million different beauties that almost disguise its unity among so many differences, and I would wish to think that in the order of spirits there are not similar differences? I would like to believe that all these spirits are enchained in the same sphere of perfection. Now if I can and must suppose spirits of another order than my own, I am led to new consequences; I am forced to recognize that there can be, even that there is, much more moral good than moral evil in the universe. Well, you will say, were I to grant you that, it would still be true to say that God’s love of virtue is not without limits, since he tolerates the vice which his power could suppress or prevent. But this objection is established only on a misleading ambiguity. Indeed, it is not true that God’s hatred of vice and his love of virtue are infinite in their exercise. Although each of his perfections is in him limitless, it is still not exercised except with restriction, and proportionally to its exterior object. Virtue is the noblest state of the created being; who doubts that? But virtue is not an infinite object; it is only the finite being, thinking and willing in order with finite degrees. Above virtue are other, greater perfections in the whole of the universe, which attract God’s indulgence. This love of the best in the whole triumphs in God over other particular loves. Hence, vice permitted: it must be so, because it is necessarily linked to the best plan, which would not have been the best of all the possible ones if intelligent virtue had been invariably virtuous. Besides, the love of virtue and the hatred of vice that tend to procure the existence of virtue and to prevent that of vice are only antecedent wills of God taken together, the result of which makes will consistent, or the decree to create the best; and it is from that decree that the love of virtue and felicity of reasoning creatures, which is indefinite in itself, and goes as far as it can, receives some small limitations because of the regard one must have for the good in general. That is how we must understand that God sovereignly loves virtue, and sovereignly hates vice, and that nevertheless some vice must be permitted.

After exculpating God’s providence over moral evils, which are sins, we must now justify it over metaphysical evils and physical evils. Let us begin with metaphysical evils, which consist in the imperfections of creatures. The Ancients attributed the cause of evil to the matter they thought uncreated and independent of God. There was so much evil only because God, in working on matter, had found a rebellious, indocile subject, incapable of bending to his beneficial intentions; but where do we, who derive everything from God, find the source of the evil? The answer is that it must be sought in the ideal nature of the creature, insofar as that creature is contained in the eternal truths which are in the divine understanding. For we must consider that there is an original imperfection in the creatures before sin, because the creatures are essentially limited. Plato said in his Timaeus that the world had its origin in understanding combined with necessity. Others have combined God and nature. One can give it a good meaning. God will be understanding and necessity, in other words the essential nature of things will be the object of the understanding insofar as it consists in the eternal truths. But that object is internal, and is found in the divine understanding. It is the region of eternal truths which we must put in the place of matter when it comes to seeking the source of things. That region is the ideal cause of good and evil. Limitations and imperfections arise in the creatures of their own nature, which limits God’s production; but vices and crimes arise from the free consent of their will.

Chrysippus says something similar. To answer the question posed to him on the origin of evil, he argues that evil comes from the primary constitution of souls; that those who are naturally good better resist the impressions of exterior causes, but that those whose natural flaws had not been corrected by discipline allowed themselves to be perverted. To explain his thought, he uses the comparison with a cylinder, whose fluidity and speed, or ease of motion, is owing principally to its shape, or else, that it would be slowed if it were rough. Nevertheless, it needs to be pushed, as the soul needs to be beckoned by sense objects, and receives that impression depending on the constitution it is in. Chrysippus is right to say that the vice comes from the original constitution of some minds. When it was objected to him that God has formed them, he replied with the imperfection of matter, which did not allow God to do better. But that reply is worthless, for matter is itself indifferent with respect to all forms, and God made it. Evil comes rather from the forms themselves, even abstract: in other words, from the ideas that God did not produce by an act of his will, no more than numbers and figures, than all possible essences, which are eternal and necessary; for they are in the ideal region of the possibles, in other words in the divine understanding. Then God is not the creator of essences insofar as they are only possibilities? But there is nothing real to which he did not give existence. He permitted evil because it is enveloped in the best plan found in the region of the possibles, which supreme wisdom could not fail to choose. That notion satisfies at the same time the wisdom, the power, and the goodness of God, and does indeed make room for the entrance of evil. God gives as much perfection to creatures as the universe can receive. You push the cylinder, but what is rough in its shape puts limits on the swiftness of its motion.

Then the supreme being, in creating a world accompanied with flaws, as is the real universe, is not responsible for the irregularities in it? They are there only because of the natural, inherent, insurmountable, and original infirmity of the creature; thus God is fully and philosophically justified. But, some audacious censor of God’s handiworks will say, why did he not abstain from the production of things rather than make imperfect ones? I reply that the abundance of God’s goodness is the cause. He wanted to communicate himself at the expense of a delicacy that we impute to God by supposing that he finds imperfections offensive. Thus, he preferred there be an imperfect world rather than nothing. Besides, that imperfect is still the most perfect that could be, and God must have been fully content with it, the imperfections of the parts serving the greater perfection of the whole. It is true that there are certain things that could have been made better, but not without other, even greater disadvantages.

Let us come now to physical evil, and see if it lends stronger arms to Manichaeism than the metaphysical and moral evils with which we have just dealt.

Is the creator of our blessings also creator of our ills? Some philosophers, alarmed by such a dogma, have preferred to deny the existence of God rather than recognize one who takes barbarous pleasure in tormenting creatures, or rather they have degraded him from the epithet of intelligent and have relegated him among the blind causes. M. Bayle seized on the different evils that cross our lives to bring back the system of the two principles, a system that collapsed many centuries ago. He apparently made use of its ruins only the way one makes use of a hovel in war for a few moments’ shelter. He was too good a philosopher to be tempted to believe in two deities, which he himself so effectively attacked, as we have seen in this article. His great end, at least so it seems, was to humiliate reason, to make it feel its impotence, and capture it under the yoke of faith. Whatever his intention, which seems suspect to many, here is the summary of his doctrine. If it was God who had established the laws of sentiment, it would certainly have been only to lavish all his creatures with all the happiness of which they are capable; he would therefore entirely have banished from the universe all feelings of suffering, and especially those that serve no purpose. What use to us are the sufferings of a man whose ills are incurable, or the sufferings of a woman giving birth in the desert? Such is the famous objection which M. Bayle extended and repeated in his writings in a hundred different ways, and although it was almost as ancient as suffering is in the world; he managed to arm it with so many impressive comparisons that philosophers and theologians were frightened of it as by a new monster. Some called metaphysics to their rescue; others fled into the immensity of the heavens, and to console us for our sufferings showed us an infinite number of worlds where the people are happy. [14] The author of the theorie des sentimens agréables [ Theory of agreeable sentiments ] replied perfectly well to this objection. [15] From it he derives the principal reasons he uses to combat it. Let us, he says, interrogate nature with our observations, and fix our thoughts by its answers. About the author of the laws of sentiment we can formulate two entirely different questions: is he intelligent? and is he beneficent? Let us examine these two questions separately, and begin by illuminating the first. Experience tells us that there are blind causes, and that there are intelligent ones: we distinguish them by the nature of their productions, and unity of design is like the seal which an intelligent cause sets on its work. Now in the laws of sentiment there gleams a perfect unity of design. Suffering and pleasure are equally related to our preservation. If pleasure indicates to us what is good for us, pain alerts us to what is harmful. It is an agreeable impression which characterizes the foodstuffs that are of a nature to change into our own substance; but it is hunger and thirst that alert us that perspiration and motion have deprived us of part of ourselves, and that it would be dangerous to defer longer the restitution of that loss. Nerves scattered throughout the body inform us of the derangements that occur there, and the same painful sentiment is proportionate to the force that torments it, so that in proportion as the pain is greater we hasten more to rebuff its cause or seek its remedy.

It sometimes happens that pain seems to alert us to our sufferings for no reason at all. Nothing in our surroundings can relieve them. This is because the laws of sentiment are like those of motion: the laws of motion determine the succession of changes that occur in bodies, and sometimes bring rain to sterile rocks or lands. The laws of sentiment similarly determine the succession of changes in animate beings, and pains that seem useless to us are sometimes their necessary consequence by the circumstances of our situation. But the apparent uselessness of these different laws in some particular cases is much less a drawback than their continual mutability would have been, which would have allowed no fixed principle to subsist that could direct the activities of men and animals. The laws of motion, moreover, are so perfectly in harmony with the structure of bodies that throughout all places and times they preserve the elements, light, and the sun from alteration, and supply animals and plants with what they require or can use. The laws of sentiment are likewise so perfectly in harmony with the organization of all animals that throughout all times and places they inform them of what is good for them and invite them to seek it; and they inform them of what is harmful to them, and force them to flee or rebuff it. What depth of intelligence in the author of nature, who, with such uniform, such simple, such fecund motives, varies at every moment the scene of the universe and preserves it ever the same!

Not only do the laws of sentiment combine with the whole universe to depose in favor of an intelligent cause; I say they also proclaim a beneficent lawgiver. If, to restore a hand numbed by cold, I hold it too close to the fire, a sharp pain repels it; and every day I owe to comparable warnings the preservation, sometimes of one part of myself, sometimes of another; but if I come only appropriately close to the fire, then I feel a gentle warmth, and that is how as soon as the impressions of objects, or the movements of the body, the mind, or the heart are, however slightly, of a nature to favor the duration of our being or its perfection, our creator has liberally attached a pleasure to it. I call as witness of this profusion of pleasant sentiments with which God alerts us painting, sculpture, architecture, all the objects of sight, music, dance, poetry, eloquence, history, all the sciences, all occupations, friendship, tenderness, in short all the movements of the body, the mind, and the heart.

M. Bayle and some other philosophers, moved to compassion by the sufferings of humankind, do not believe themselves sufficiently compensated by all these blessings, and would almost like to make us regret it is not they who were in charge of dictating the laws of sentiment. Let us suppose for a moment that nature had laid this care on them, and try to guess what would have been the plan of their administration. Apparently they would have first of all barred entrance to the universe of any painful sentiment; we would have lived only for pleasure, but our lives would then have had the fate of those flowers that open and die in the space of a day. Hunger, thirst, distaste, cold, heat, weariness, in short no pain would have alerted us to evils present or to come, no restraint would have moderated us in the use of pleasures, and suffering would have been destroyed in the universe only to give way to death, which, to destroy all species of animals, would equally have armed itself against them with their ills and their blessings.

These presumptuous legislators, to prevent this universal destruction, would doubtless have recalled the painful sentiments, and contented themselves with weakening the impression they make. It would have been nothing but dull pains that would have warned us rather than afflicting us. But all the inconveniences of the foreground would have been found again in the background. These respectful warnings would have been too weak a voice to be heard while enjoying pleasures. How many men have difficulty hearing the threats of the most intense pains! We would again have soon found death in the very use of the benefits destined to insure our survival. To compensate us for the pain, we might have added a new intensity to the pleasure of the senses. But those of the mind and the heart would then have become insipid, and yet it is they whose nature is most likely to fill the void of life. The ecstasy of a few moments would then have poisoned all the rest of time with boredom. Would it have been by increasing the pleasures of the soul that we would have been consoled for our pains? They would have made us forget to take care of the body. Finally, would one have redoubled in the same proportion all the pleasures, those of the senses, of the mind, and of the heart? But then it would have been necessary to add in the same proportion a new vivacity to the sentiments of pain. It would not be less pernicious for humankind to increase the sentiment of pleasure without increasing that of pain, than to lessen the sentiment of pain without weakening that of pleasure. These two different reforms would produce the same effect, by weakening the restraint that prevents us from giving ourselves over to mortal excesses.

The same legislators would doubtless have characterized with enjoyment all the benefits necessary to our preservation, but could we have hoped for them to have been as ingenious as nature is, to open in favor of sight, hearing, and mind sources always fertile in agreeable sentiments in the variety of objects, in their sympathy, their proportion, and their resemblance to common objects? Would they have thought to mark by an impression those unseen relations that make the charms of music, the graces of the body and mind, the enchanting spectacle of beauty in plants, animals, man, in thoughts, in sentiments? So let us not regret the reform that M. Bayle would like to have introduced into the laws of sentiment. Let us rather recognize that the goodness of God is such that he seems to have bestowed all sorts of pleasures and comforts which could be marked with the seal of his wisdom. Let us therefore conclude that since the distribution of pleasure and of suffering enters equally into the same unity of design, they do not manifest two essentially adversarial intelligences.

I feel it may be objected that because God could have made us happy, he is not the infinitely good Being. This objection supposes that the happiness of reasoning creatures is God’s sole purpose. I concede that if God had considered only man in his choice of one of the possible worlds, he would have chosen a series of possible worlds from which all those evils would be excluded. But the infinitely wise Being would have been failing himself, and would not have rigorously followed the greatest result of all his tendencies to the good. Man’s happiness was one of his ends, but it was not the sole and ultimate limit of his wisdom. The rest of the universe deserved his consideration. The sufferings that come to man are a consequence of his submission to universal laws, from which a shower of goods derives of which we have but imperfect awareness. Indubitably, God cannot make his creature suffer just to make it suffer. That pitiless and barbaric will could not be in him who is not less goodness than power. But when humanity’s evil is necessarily dependent on the greatest good in the whole, God must let himself be determined for the greatest good. Let us not detach what is bound by an indissoluble knot. The power of God is infinite, as well as his goodness, but both are tempered by his wisdom, which is not less infinite, and which always tends to the greatest good. If there is evil in his handiwork, it is only by way of condition, it is even there only by way of necessity that ties it to the most perfect, it is there only by virtue of the original limitation of the creature. A world where our happiness would not have been altered, and where all of nature would have served our pleasures with no admixture of unhappiness, was assuredly very possible, but it would have entailed a thousand disorders greater than the mixture of sufferings that disrupt our pleasures.

But could God not have dispensed us from being subjected to bodies, and thereby saved us from the sufferings that follow from that union? He could not, because creatures made like us entered necessarily into the plan of the best world. It is true that a world where there would have been only intelligences was possible, just as a world which would have had only corporeal beings. A third world where, bodies existing with spirits, these various substances would have been without any relationship between them, was equally possible. But all those worlds are less perfect than ours, which, besides the pure spirits of the first, the corporeal beings of the second, and the spirits and bodies of the third, contains a connection, a concert between the two species of creatable substances. A world which had only spirits would have been too simple, too uniform. Wisdom must vary its works more than that; to multiply only the same thing, however noble it be, would be a superfluity. To have a thousand Vergils well bound in one’s library, to sing always the same opera arias, to have only buttons of diamonds, to eat nothing but pheasants, to drink no wine but Champagne: would we call that reason? The second world, I mean the one that would have been purely material, being by its nature insensible and inanimate, would not have known itself and would have been incapable of rendering to God the acts of thanks due to him. The third world would have been like an imperfect edifice, or like a palace where solitude reigned, like a state without a head, without a king, or like a temple without a sacrificer. But in a world where spirit is allied with matter, man becomes the center of everything: he makes all corporeal beings, of which he is the necessary link, go back to God. He is the soul of all that is animate, [16] the intelligence of all that has none, the interpreter of everything that has not received language, the priest and pontiff of all nature. Who does not see that such a world is much more perfect than the others?

But let us return to the system of the two principles. M. Bayle himself concedes that the surest and clearest ideas of order teach us that a being that exists of itself, which is necessary, which is eternal, must be unique, infinite, omnipotent, and endowed with all sorts of perfections; that in consulting those ideas, we find nothing more absurd than the hypothesis of two eternal principles independent of each other. That concession from M. Bayle is enough for me, and I have no need to follow him in all his arguments. But to be good, he says, a system needs two things: one, that its ideas be distinct; the other, that it be able to account for the phenomena. I agree; but if you are wanting in ideas to explain the phenomena, who obliges you to make a system that explains all the contradictions that you imagine you are seeing in the universe? To execute such a noble design, you lack intermediary ideas which God has not seen fit to give you; besides, what necessity is there, for the truth of the system which God prescribed for himself, that you be able to understand it? Let us conclude that by supposing that the system of the unity of principle does not suffice to explain the phenomena, you are not in a position to allow as true that of the Manichaean s. It lacks one essential condition, which is not to be based, as you agree, on clear and certain ideas, but rather on absurd ideas. So if it accounts for the phenomena, it should get no credit for that: it can owe that advantage only to what is defective in its principles. Therefore, you miss the goal, by exposing here all your arguments in favor of Manichaeism . Know that a supposition is bad when it cannot account for phenomena only when that inability comes from within the supposition itself, but if its inability results from the limits of our mind, and from our not having yet acquired enough knowledge to make use of it, it is false that it is bad. Bayle built his system about the origin of evil on the principles of the goodness, the holiness, and the omnipotence of God. Malebranche prefers those of order, of wisdom. Leibniz believes it takes only sufficient reason to explain everything. The theologians make use of the principles of freedom, of general providence, and the fall of Adam. The Socinians deny divine prescience; the Origenists, the eternity of punishments; Spinoza allows only a blind and fatal necessity; pagan philosophers had recourse to metempsychosis. The principles which Bayle, Malebranche, Leibniz, and the theologians invoke are so many truths. That is their advantage over those of the Socinians, the Origenists, the Spinozists, and the pagan philosophers. But none of these truths is fertile enough to provide the reason for everything. Bayle is not mistaken when he says that God is holy, good, and omnipotent; he is mistaken in thinking those givens sufficient; he wants to make a system. I say the same for the others. The small number of truths which our reason can discover and those which are revealed to us form part of a system capable of resolving all possible problems, but they are not destined to make us know it. God has only drawn back one panel of the curtain that hides from us the great mystery of the origin of evil. By that one can judge whether Bayle’s objections, whatever the force and skill with which he manipulated them, and with whatever air of triumph these men support it, were deserving of all the terror they have spread in people’s minds.

1. Claude Fleury (1640-1723), Histoire ecclésiastique (Paris, 1691- ); link is to a 36-vol. edition published from 1703 to 1751. Volumes 21-36 are by Jean-Claude Fabre (1668-1753).

2. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Manichéens , in the Dictionnaire historique and critique (Rotterdam, 1697).

3. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), bishop of Meaux, Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes (1688). Here is an English translation (Dublin, 1836).

4. Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), Historia religionis veterum Persarum eorumque magorum [History of the ancient Persians and their magicians] (Oxford, 1700).

5. Allusion to the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the desert, related in Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, and Luke 4:1–13.

6. Isaac Jaquelot (1647–1708), author of Dissertations sur l’existence de Dieu (The Hague, 1697); Jean Leclerc (1657–1736), a prolific Genevan Biblical scholar; the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz (1646-1716). Here the reference is to Leibniz, Essais de théodicée [Essays in theodicy] (Amsterdam, 1747). This French edition includes a biography of Leibniz by the chevalier de Jaucourt, who would later become the Encyclopédie ’s most prolific contributor.

7. Tourbillon , a specific aspect of the cosmology of René Descartes.

8. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Oratorian and Cartesian theologian, whose magnum opus was De la recherche de la vérité [In search of truth] (1674–1675).

9. Nicolas de Malebranche, Traité de la nature et de la grâce (Amsterdam, 1680 ; link is to 1684 edition).

10. Leibniz’s formula, which Voltaire had particularly satirized in Candide (1759).

11. Univers seems to be used here mainly in relation to earth, as in the first definition of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux : “A collective name that means the entire world: all created creatures, the assemblage of all beings” – particularly since, unlike earth, the heavens are purported to be perfect. Nevertheless, the word often takes in all creation: “The Ancients believed the universe had no limits, that it was infinite” ( ibid .).

12. Lucian of Samosata (1 ^st century), author of Timon or the misanthrope , which is about the Timon of Athens who is also the subject of Shakespeare’s play by that name.

13. Jacques Esprit (1611–1677) was in fact never a priest, though his brother was, but he did write La Fausseté des vertus humaines (Paris, 1677-1678).

14. Everything in the heavens (i.e., higher than the moon) was presumed to be perfect.

15. Louis Jean Levesque de Pouilly (1691–1750), Théorie des sentimens agréables (Geneva, 1747).

16. By definition, in traditional Christian theology, the soul ( anima ) is what animates ( animare ), by virtue of which all creatures that move on their own in some sense have souls.