l Being. This is
how the dilemma is put: it is either impotence or bad will; impotence,
if he wished to hinder evil and could not; bad will, if he could have
hindered it and did not will it. A child would understand that. It is
this that has led people to imagine the fault of the first father of us
all, original sin, future rewards and punishments, the incarnation,
immortality, the two principles of the Manicheans, the Ormuzd and
Ahriman of the Persians, the doctrine of emanations, the empire of light
and darkness, metempsychosis, optimism, and other absurdities that have
found credit among the different nations of the earth, where there is
always to be found some hollow vision of a dream, by way of answer to a
clear, precise, and definite fact.

"On such occasions what is the part of good sense? Why, the part that we
took: whatever the optimists may say, we will reply to them that if the
universe could not exist without sensible creatures, nor sensible
creatures without pain, there was nothing to do but to leave chaos at
peace. They had got on very well for a whole eternity without any such
piece of folly.

"The world a piece of folly! Ah, my dear, a glorious folly for all that!
'Tis, according to some of the inhabitants of Malabar, one of the
seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses himself.

"Leibnitz, the founder of optimism, tells somewhere how there was in the
Temple of Memphis a high pyramid of globes placed one above the others;
how a priest, being asked by a traveller about this pyramid and its
globes, made answer that these were all the possible worlds, and that
the most perfect of them all was at the summit; how the traveller,
curious to see this most perfect of all possible worlds, mounted to the
top of the pyramid, and the first thing that caught his eyes, as they
turned towards the globe at the summit, was Tarquin outraging
Lucretia."[221]

Almost every letter reminds us that we are in the very height of the
disputing, arguing, rationalistic century. Diderot delighted in this
kind of argument, as Socrates or Dr. Johnson delighted in it. He was
above all others the archetype and representative of the passion for
moralising, analysing, and philosophising which made the epoch what it
was; but the rest of the world was all in the same vein. If he came to
Paris in a coach from the country, he found a young lady in it, eager to
demonstrate that serious passions are nowadays merely ridiculous; that