s produced either
completely to cease to be or to change and deteriorate. For it causes no
offence to God that there should be other Beings than he, that is beings
who can be not what they are, and do not what they do or do what they do
not.'

199. M. Bayle calls this answer paltry, but I find his counter-objection
involved. M. Bayle will have those who are for the two principles to take
their stand chiefly on the assumption of the supreme freedom of God: for if
he were compelled to produce all that which he can, he would produce also
sins and sorrows. Thus the Dualists could from the existence of evil
conclude nothing contrary to the oneness of the principle, if this
principle were as much inclined to evil as to good. There M. Bayle carries
the notion of freedom too far: for even though God be supremely free, it
does not follow that he maintains an indifference of equipoise: and even
though he be inclined to act, it does not follow that he is compelled by
this inclination to produce all that which he can. He will produce only
that which he wills, for his inclination prompts him to good. I admit the
supreme freedom of God, but I do not confuse it with indifference of
equipoise, as if he could act without reason. M. Diroys therefore imagines
that the Dualists, in their insistence that the single good principle
produce no evil, ask too much; for by the same reason, according to M.
Diroys, they ought also to ask that he should produce the greatest good,
the less good being a kind of evil. I hold that the Dualists are wrong in
respect of the first point, and that they would be right in respect of the
second, where M. Diroys blames them without cause; or rather that one can
reconcile the evil, or the less good, in some parts with the best in the
whole. If the Dualists demanded that God should do the best, they would not
be demanding too much. They are mistaken rather in claiming that the best
in the whole should be free from evil in the parts, and that therefore what
God has made is not the best.

200. But M. Diroys maintains that if God always produces the best he will
produce other Gods; otherwise each substance that he produced would not be
the best nor the most perfect. But he is mistaken, through not taking into
account the order and connexion of things. If each substance taken
separately were perfect, all would be alike; which is neither fitting nor
possible. If they were Gods, it would not have been possible to