is to the disadvantage of a part taken separately may serve the
perfection of the whole.

334. Chrysippus had already made an observation to this effect, not only in
his fourth book on Providence, as given by Aulus Gellius (lib. 6, c. 1)
where he asserts that evil serves to bring the good to notice (a reason
which is not sufficient here), but still better when he applies the
comparison of a stage play, in his second book on Nature (as Plutarch
quotes it himself). There he says that there are sometimes portions in a
comedy which are of no worth in themselves and which nevertheless lend
grace to the whole poem. He calls these portions epigrams or inscriptions.
We have not enough acquaintance with the nature of the ancient comedy for
full understanding of this passage from Chrysippus; but since Plutarch
assents to the fact, there is reason to believe that this comparison was
not a poor one. Plutarch replies in the first place that the world is not
like a play to provide entertainment. But that is a poor answer: the
comparison lies in this point alone, that one bad part may make the whole
better. He replies secondly that this bad passage is only a small part of
the comedy, whereas human life swarms with evils. This reply is of no value
either: for he ought to have taken into account that what we know is also a
very small part of the universe.

335. But let us return to the cylinder of Chrysippus. He is right in saying
that vice springs from the original constitution of some minds. He was met
with the objection that God formed them, and he could only reply by
pointing to the imperfection of matter, which did not permit God to do
better. This reply is of no value, for matter in itself is indifferent to
all forms, and God made it. Evil springs rather from the _Forms_ themselves
in their detached state, that is, from the ideas that God has not produced
by an act of his will, any more than he thus produced numbers and [327]
figures, and all possible essences which one must regard as eternal and
necessary; for they are in the ideal region of the possibles, that is, in
the divine understanding. God is therefore not the author of essences in so
far as they are only possibilities. But there is nothing actual to which he
has not decreed and given existence; and he has permitted evil because it
is involved in the best plan existing in the region of possibles, a plan
which supreme wisdom could not fail to choose. This notion satisf