blame of their ill success on the
violence of the disease or the fury of the tempest? Had there not been
danger, we should say, who would have applied to you? This reasoning
has still greater force against the Deity. The fault, you say, is in
man, if he commits crimes. But why was not man endued with a reason
incapable of producing any crimes? How could the Gods err? When we
leave our effects to our children, it is in hopes that they may be well
bestowed; in which we may be deceived, but how can the Deity be
deceived? As Phoebus when he trusted his chariot to his son Phaethon,
or as Neptune when he indulged his son Theseus in granting him three
wishes, the consequence of which was the destruction of Hippolitus?
These are poetical fictions; but truth, and not fables, ought to
proceed from philosophers. Yet if those poetical Deities had foreseen
that their indulgence would have proved fatal to their sons, they must
have been thought blamable for it.

Aristo of Chios used often to say that the philosophers do hurt to such
of their disciples as take their good doctrine in a wrong sense; thus
the lectures of Aristippus might produce debauchees, and those of Zeno
pedants. If this be true, it were better that philosophers should be
silent than that their disciples should be corrupted by a
misapprehension of their master's meaning; so if reason, which was
bestowed on mankind by the Gods with a good design, tends only to make
men more subtle and fraudulent, it had been better for them never to
have received it. There could be no excuse for a physician who
prescribes wine to a patient, knowing that he will drink it and
immediately expire. Your Providence is no less blamable in giving
reason to man, who, it foresaw, would make a bad use of it. Will you
say that it did not foresee it? Nothing could please me more than such
an acknowledgment. But you dare not. I know what a sublime idea you
entertain of her.

XXXII. But to conclude. If folly, by the unanimous consent of
philosophers, is allowed to be the greatest of all evils, and if no one
ever attained to true wisdom, we, whom they say the immortal Gods take
care of, are consequently in a state of the utmost misery. For that
nobody is well, or that nobody can be well, is in effect the same
thing; and, in my opinion, that no man is truly wise, or that no man
can be truly wise, is likewise the same thing. But I will insist no
further on so self-evident a point. Telamon in one ver