one restores them to the right angle of vision or
one views them by means of a certain glass or mirror. It is by placing and
using them properly that one makes them serve as adornment for a room. Thus
the apparent deformities of our little worlds combine to become beauties in
the great world, and have nothing in them which is opposed to the oneness
of an infinitely perfect universal principle: on the contrary, they
increase our wonder at the wisdom of him who makes evil serve the greater
good.

148. M. Bayle continues: 'that man is wicked and miserable; that there are
everywhere prisons and hospitals; that history is simply a collection of
the crimes and calamities of the human race.' I think that there is
exaggeration in that: there is incomparably more good than evil in the life
of men, as there are incomparably more houses than prisons. With regard to
virtue and vice, a certain mediocrity prevails. Machiavelli has already
observed that there are few very wicked and very good men, and that this
causes the failure of many great enterprises. I find it a great fault in
historians that they keep their mind on the evil more than on the [217]
good. The chief end of history, as also of poetry, should be to teach
prudence and virtue by examples, and then to display vice in such a way as
to create aversion to it and to prompt men to avoid it, or serve towards
that end.

149. M. Bayle avows: 'that one finds everywhere both moral good and
physical good, some examples of virtue, some examples of happiness, and
that this is what makes the difficulty. For if there were only wicked and
unhappy people', he says, 'there would be no need to resort to the
hypothesis of the two principles.' I wonder that this admirable man could
have evinced so great an inclination towards this opinion of the two
principles; and I am surprised at his not having taken into account that
this romance of human life, which makes the universal history of the human
race, lay fully devised in the divine understanding, with innumerable
others, and that the will of God only decreed its existence because this
sequence of events was to be most in keeping with the rest of things, to
bring forth the best result. And these apparent faults in the whole world,
these spots on a Sun whereof ours is but a ray, rather enhance its beauty
than diminish it, contributing towards that end by obtaining a greater
good. There are in truth two principles, but they are both in Go