Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/240

216 on the contrary, I will it all the more strongly because I will it irresistibly.

Does this necessity deprive it of liberty? Not at all. Liberty can only be the power to act. Since the supreme being is very powerful, it is the freest of beings.

We thus recognise that the great artisan of things is necessary, eternal, intelligent, powerful, possessed of will, and free.

What are the effects of this eternal power that dwells essentially in nature? I see only two classes of them, the insensitive and the sensitive.

The earth, the seas, the planets, the suns, seem admirable but lifeless things, devoid of sensibility. A snail that wills, has some degree of perception, and makes love, seems, to that extent, to have an advantage greater than all the glory of the suns that illumine space.

But all these beings are alike subject to eternal and unvarying laws.

Neither the sun, nor the snail, nor the oyster, nor the dog, nor the ape, nor man, has given himself any one of the things which he has; it is evident that they have received everything.

Man and the dog are born, unwittingly, of a mother who has brought them into the world in spite of herself. Both of them suck the mother's