ked like getting him into trouble. It began: 'O sancta[335]
mater natura, aeterne rerum ordo'. And it ended by saying that this Nature
must forgive him his errors, since she herself was their cause. But the
nature of things, if taken as without intelligence and without choice, has
in it nothing sufficiently determinant. Herr Becher did not sufficiently
take into account that the Author of things (_natura naturans_) must be
good and wise, and that we can be evil without complicity on his part in
our acts of wickedness. When a wicked man exists, God must have found in
the region of possibles the idea of such a man forming part of that
sequence of things, the choice of which was demanded by the greatest
perfection of the universe, and in which errors and sins are not only
punished but even repaired to greater advantage, so that they contribute to
the greatest good.

351. M. Bayle, however, has extended the free choice of God a little too
far. Speaking of the Peripatetic Strato (_Reply to the Questions of a
Provincial_, vol. III, ch. 180, p. 1239), who asserted that everything had
been brought forth by the necessity of a nature devoid of intelligence, he
maintains that this philosopher, on being asked why a tree has not the
power to form bones and veins, might have asked in his turn: Why has matter
precisely three dimensions? why should not two have sufficed for it? why
has it not four? 'If one had answered that there can be neither more nor
less than three dimensions he would have demanded the cause of this
impossibility.' These words lead one to believe that M. Bayle suspected
that the number of the dimensions of matter depended upon God's choice,
even as it depended upon him to cause or not to cause trees to produce
animals. Indeed, how do we know whether there are not planetary globes or
earths situated in some more remote place in the universe where the fable
of the Barnacle-geese of Scotland (birds that were said to be born of
trees) proves true, and even whether there are not countries where one
could say:

_... populos umbrosa creavit_
_Fraxinus, et foeta viridis puer excidit alno?_

But with the dimensions of matter it is not thus: the ternary number is
determined for it not by the reason of the best, but by a geometrical
necessity, because the geometricians have been able to prove that there are
only three straight lines perpendicular to one another which can intersect
at one and the same point. Nothing more