12 DESCARTES. 



freely planned on an open plain ; so that although 

 the several buildings of the former may often equal 

 or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when 

 one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, 

 there a large one and here a small, and the conse 

 quent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, 

 one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any 

 human will guided by reason, must have led to such 

 an arrangement. And if we consider that neverthe 

 less there have been at all times certain officers 

 whose duty it was to see that private buildings con 

 tributed to public ornament, the difficulty of reach 

 ing high perfection with but the materials of others 

 to operate on, will be readily acknowledged. In the 

 same way I fancied that those nations which, start 

 ing from a semi-barbarous state and advancing to 

 civilisation by slow degrees, have had their laws 

 successively determined, and, as it were, forced 

 upon them simply by experience of the hurtfulness 

 of particular crimes and disputes, would by this proc 

 ess come to be possessed of less perfect institutions 

 than those which, from the commencement of their 

 association as communities, have followed the 

 appointments of some wise legislator. It is thus 

 quite certain that the constitution of the true reli 

 gion, the ordinances of which are derived from God, 

 must be incomparably superior to that of every 

 other. And, to speak of human affairs, I believe 

 that the past pre-eminence of Sparta was due not to 

 the goodness of each of its laws in particular, for 

 many of these were very strange, and even opposed 

 to good morals, but to the circumstance that, orig- 



