in their endeavor to show that
nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to
man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods,
and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result:
among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some
hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, &c.: so they
declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at
some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in
their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by
infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of
pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their
inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such
contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were
ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of
ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning
and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that
God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a
doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the
human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished
another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and
properties of figures without regard to their final causes.
There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides
mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed
to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge
of the truth.

I have now sufficiently explained my first point. There is
no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in
view, and that final causes are mere human figments. This, I
think, is already evident enough, both from the causes and
foundations on which I have shown such prejudice to be based, and
also from Prop. xvi., and the Corollary of Prop. xxxii., and, in
fact, all those propositions in which I have shown, that
everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with
the utmost perfection. However, I will add a few remarks, in
order to overthrow this doctrine of a final cause utterly. That
which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa:
it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and that
which is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect. Passing
over the questions of cause and priority as self--evident, it is
plain from Props. xxi., xxii., xxiii. that the effect is most
perfect which i