es frightful diseases, and parches the
fields; the pastures are without verdure, the trees without fruit, the
crops are scorched, the springs are dried up; I can only with difficulty
subsist, and now complain of the cruelties of nature, which to you
always appears so beneficent. If these seas bring me spices, and useless
commodities, do they not destroy numberless mortals, who are foolish
enough to seek them? The vanity of man persuades him, that he is the
sole center of the universe; he creates for himself a world and a God;
he thinks himself of sufficient consequence to derange nature at his
pleasure. But, concerning other animals, he reasons like an atheist. Does
he not imagine, that the individuals different from his own are automatons
unworthy of the blessings of universal providence, and that brutes cannot
be objects of his justice or goodness? Mortals regard the happy or unhappy
events, health or sickness, life or death, plenty or want, as rewards or
punishments for the right use or abuse of the liberty, with which they
erroneously imagine themselves endowed. Do they reason in the same manner
concerning the brutes? No. Although they see them, under a just God, enjoy
and suffer, equally subject to health and sickness, live and die, like
themselves, it never occurs to them to ask by what crime, these beasts
could have incurred the displeasure of their Creator? Have not men,
blinded by their religious prejudices, in order to free themselves from
embarrassment, carried their folly so far as to pretend that beasts have
no feeling?

Will men never renounce their foolish pretensions? Will they never
acknowledge that nature is not made for them? Will they never see that
nature has placed equality among all beings she has produced? Will they
never perceive that all organized beings are equally made to be born and
die, enjoy and suffer? Finally, far from having any cause to be puffed
up with their mental faculties, are they not forced to grant, that these
faculties often make them more unhappy than beasts, in which we find
neither opinions, prejudices, vanities, nor follies, which every moment
decide the welfare of man?

100.

The superiority which men arrogate over other animals, is chiefly founded
upon their opinion, that they have the exclusive possession of an immortal
soul. But ask them what this soul is, and they are puzzled. They will say,
it is an unknown substance--a secret power distinct from their bodies