houses?"

Pecuchet answered: "Yet the stomach is made to digest, the leg to walk,
the eye to see, although there are dyspepsias, fractures, and cataracts.
No arrangements without an end. The effects came on at the exact time or
at a later period. Everything depends on laws; therefore, there are
final causes."

Bouvard imagined that perhaps Spinoza would furnish him with some
arguments, and he wrote to Dumouchel to get him Saisset's translation.

Dumouchel sent him a copy belonging to his friend Professor Varelot,
exiled on the 2nd of December.

Ethics terrified them with its axioms, its corollaries. They read only
the pages marked with pencil, and understood this:

"'The substance is that which is of itself, by itself, without cause,
without origin. This substance is God. He alone is extension, and
extension is without bounds.'"

"What can it be bound with?"

"'But, though it be infinite, it is not the absolute infinite, for it
contains only one kind of perfection, and the Absolute contains all.'"

They frequently stopped to think it out the better. Pecuchet took
pinches of snuff, and Bouvard's face glowed with concentrated attention.

"Does this amuse you?"

"Yes, undoubtedly. Go on forever."

"'God displays Himself in an infinite number of attributes which
express, each in its own way, the infinite character of His being. We
know only two of them--extension and thought.

"'From thought and extension flow innumerable modes, which contain
others. He who would at the same time embrace all extension and all
thought would see there no contingency, nothing accidental, but a
geometrical succession of terms, bound amongst themselves by necessary
laws.'"

"Ah! that would be beautiful!" exclaimed Bouvard.

"'If God had a will, an end, if He acted for a cause, that would mean
that He would have some want, that He would lack some one perfection. He
would not be God.

"'Thus our world is but one point in the whole of things, and the
universe, impenetrable by our knowledge, is a portion of an infinite
number of universes emitting close to ours infinite modifications.
Extension envelops our universe, but is enveloped by God, who contains
in His thought all possible universes, and His thought itself is
enveloped in His substance.'"

It appeared to them that this substance was filled at night with an icy
coldness, carried away in an endless course towards a bottomless abyss,
leaving nothing around them but the Un