146 lAIEMOIRS OF 



true of the great world, the gh^be, and all its in- 

 habitants. The beings which compose it, and 

 which people it, contribute to its existence ; 

 they are necessary to each other, and to the 

 whole ; they have been so since this existence 

 has subsisted; they will be as long as it shall 

 subsist. The world is like an individual, all its 

 parts act on each other : we can imagine other 

 worlds more or less rich, more or less peopled, 

 the preservation of which rests on other means ; 

 but we cannot conceive the present world de- 

 prived of one or several of the classes of beings 

 which inhabit it, any more than the body of 

 man deprived of one or several of its systems of 

 organs. 



" There is, then, in the world, as in the body of 

 man, that which is necessary, and nothing more. 

 What law could have obliged the Creator unne- 

 cessarily to produce useless forms, merely to fill 

 up the vacancies in a scale, which is only a spe- 

 culation of the mind, and which has no other 

 foundation than the beauty which some philoso- 

 phers discover in it ? But in every thing beauty 

 consists in relative fitness : the beauty of the 

 world is formed by the happy concourse of 

 beings which compose it, in their mutual pre- 

 servation, and in that of the whole, and not in 



