which makes them prudent.

Profound students of politics affirm that, if Cromwell, Ludlow, Ireton
and a dozen other parliamentarians had been assassinated a week before
Charles I.'s head was cut off, this king might have lived longer and
died in his bed; they are right; they can add further that if the whole
of England had been swallowed up in the sea, this monarch would not
have perished on a scaffold near Whitehall; but things were arranged so
that Charles had to have his neck severed.

Cardinal d'Ossat was doubtless more prudent than a madman in Bedlam; but
is it not clear that the organs of d'Ossat the sage were made otherwise
than those of the scatter-brain? just as a fox's organs are different
from a stork's and a lark's.

Your doctor saved your aunt; but assuredly he did not in that contradict
nature's order; he followed it. It is clear that your aunt could not
stop herself being born in such and such town, that she could not stop
herself having a certain malady at a particular time, that the doctor
could not be elsewhere than in the town where he was, that your aunt had
to call him, that he had to prescribe for her the drugs which cured her,
or which one thinks cured her, when nature was the only doctor.

A peasant thinks that it has hailed on his field by chance; but the
philosopher knows that there is no chance, and that it was impossible,
in the constitution of this world, for it not to hail on that day in
that place.

There are persons who, frightened by this truth, admit half of it as
debtors who offer half to their creditors, and ask respite for the rest.
"There are," they say, "some events which are necessary, and others
which are not." It would be very comic that one part of the world was
arranged, and that the other were not; that a part of what happens had
to happen, and that another part of what happens did not have to happen.
If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that
of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason
badly, others not to reason at all, others to persecute those who
reason.

Some say to you: "Do not believe in fatalism; for then everything
appearing inevitable, you will work at nothing, you will wallow in
indifference, you will love neither riches, nor honours, nor glory; you
will not want to acquire anything, you will believe yourself without
merit as without power; no talent will be cultivated, everything will
perish through apat