y to the supposition that even
the best men may be extinguished by death. He says if it is so, we may
be sure that if it ought to have been otherwise, the gods would have
ordered it otherwise (xii. 5). His conviction of the wisdom which we may
observe in the government of the world is too strong to be disturbed by
any apparent irregularities in the order of things. That these disorders
exist is a fact, and those who would conclude from them against the
being and government of God conclude too hastily. We all admit that
there is an order in the material world, a Nature, in the sense in which
that word has been explained, a constitution ([Greek: kataskeue]), what we
call a system, a relation of parts to one another and a fitness of the
whole for something. So in the constitution of plants and of animals
there is an order, a fitness for some end. Sometimes the order, as we
conceive it, is interrupted, and the end, as we conceive it, is not
attained. The seed, the plant, or the animal sometimes perishes before
it has passed through all its changes and done all its uses. It is
according to Nature, that is a fixed order, for some to perish early and
for others to do all their uses and leave successors to take their
place. So man has a corporeal and intellectual and moral constitution
fit for certain uses, and on the whole man performs these uses, dies,
and leaves other men in his place. So society exists, and a social state
is manifestly the natural state of man--the state for which his nature
fits him, and society amidst innumerable irregularities and disorders
still subsists; and perhaps we may say that the history of the past and
our present knowledge give us a reasonable hope that its disorders will
diminish, and that order, its governing principle, may be more firmly
established. As order then, a fixed order, we may say, subject to
deviations real or apparent, must be admitted to exist in the whole
nature of things, that which we call disorder or evil, as it seems to
us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general constitution of
things having a nature or fixed order. Nobody will conclude from the
existence of disorder that order is not the rule, for the existence of
order both physical and moral is proved by daily experience and all past
experience. We cannot conceive how the order of the universe is
maintained: we cannot even conceive how our own life from day to day is
continued, nor how we perform the simplest mo