I am unable to understand how there is any evil in this opinion. If God should act in any other way he would not act as God. I will give an illustration. A wise prince in choosing a general whose intimates he knows, chooses at the same time certain colonels and captains whom he well knows this general will recommend and whom he will not wish to refuse to him for certain prudential reasons. This fact, however, does not at all destroy the absolute power of the prince nor his freedom. The same applies to God even more certainly.

Therefore to reason rightly we must think of God as having a certain more general and more comprehensive intention which has regard to the whole order of the universe because the universe is a whole which God sees through and through with a single glance. This more general intention embraces virtually the other intentions touching what transpires in this universe and among these is also that of creating a particular Adam who is related to the line of his posterity which God has already chosen as such and we may even say that these particular intentions differ from the general intention only in a single respect, that is to say, as the situation of a city regarded from a particular point of view has its particular geometrical plan. These various intentions all express the whole universe in the same way that each situation expresses the city. In fact the wiser a man is, the less detached intentions does he have, and again the more views and intentions that one has the less comprehensive and inter-related they are.

Each particular intention involves a relation to all the others, so that they may be concerted together in the best way possible. Far from finding in this anything repellent, I think that the contrary view destroys the perfection of God. In my opinion one must be hard to please or else prejudiced when he finds opinions so innocent or rather so reasonable, worthy of exaggerations so strange as those which were sent to Your Highness.

If what I said be thought over a little it will be found to be evident ex terminis: for by the individual concept, Adam, I mean of course a perfect representation of a particular Adam who has certain individual characteristics and is thus distinguished from an infinity of possible persons very similar to him yet for all that different from him (as ellipses always differ from the circle, however closely they may approach it). God has preferred him to these others because it has pleased God to choose precisely such an arrangement of the universe, and everything which is a consequence of this resolution is necessary only by a hypothetical necessity and by no means destroys the freedom of God nor that of the created spirits. There is a possible Adam whose posterity is of a certain sort, and an infinity of other possible Adams whose posterity would be otherwise; now is it not true that these possible Adams (if we may speak of them thus) differ among themselves and that God has chosen only one who is precisely ours? There are so many reasons which prove the impossibility, not to say the absurdity and even the impiety of the contrary view, that I believe all men are really of the same opinion when they think over a little what they are saying. Perhaps M. A. also, if he had not been prejudiced against me as he was at first, would not have found my propositions so strange and would not have deduced from them the consequences which he did.

I sincerely think I have met M. Arnaud's objection and I am glad to see that the point which he has selected as the most startling, is in my opinion so little so. I do not know, however, whether I will have the pleasure of bringing M. Arnaud to acknowledge it also. Among the thousand advantages of great intellectual ability there is this little defect, that those who are possessed of this great intellectual ability, having the right to trust to their opinions, are not easily changed. As for myself, who am not of this stamp, I glory in acknowledging that I have been taught, and I should even find pleasure in being taught, provided I could say it sincerely and without flattery.