A heated imagination sees in the universe only the blessings of heaven; a calmer mind finds in it both good and evil. "I exist," say you; but is this existence always a good? "Behold," you say, "that sun, which lights; this earth, which for you is covered with crops and verdure; these flowers, which bloom to regale your senses; these trees, which bend under the weight of delicious fruits; these pure waters, which run only to quench your thirst; those seas, which embrace the universe to facilitate your commerce; these animals, which a foreseeing nature provides for your use." Yes; I see all these things, and I enjoy them. But in many climates, this beautiful sun is almost always hidden; in others, its excessive heat torments, creates storms, produces frightful diseases, and parches the fields; the pastures are without verdure, the trees without fruit, the crops are scorched, the springs are dried up; I can only with difficulty subsist, and now complain of the cruelties of nature, which to you always appears so beneficent. If these seas bring me spices, and useless commodities, do they not destroy numberless mortals, who are foolish enough to seek them? The vanity of man persuades him, that he is the sole center of the universe; he creates for himself a world and a God; he thinks himself of sufficient consequence to derange nature at his pleasure. But, concerning other animals, he reasons like an atheist. Does he not imagine, that the individuals different from his own are automatons unworthy of the blessings of universal providence, and that brutes cannot be objects of his justice or goodness? Mortals regard the happy or unhappy events, health or sickness, life or death, plenty or want, as rewards or punishments for the right use or abuse of the liberty, with which they erroneously imagine themselves endowed. Do they reason in the same manner concerning the brutes? No. Although they see them, under a just God, enjoy and suffer, equally subject to health and sickness, live and die, like themselves, it never occurs to them to ask by what crime, these beasts could have incurred the displeasure of their Creator? Have not men, blinded by their religious prejudices, in order to free themselves from embarrassment, carried their folly so far as to pretend that beasts have no feeling?

Will men never renounce their foolish pretensions? Will they never acknowledge that nature is not made for them? Will they never see that nature has placed equality among all beings she has produced? Will they never perceive that all organized beings are equally made to be born and die, enjoy and suffer? Finally, far from having any cause to be puffed up with their mental faculties, are they not forced to grant, that these faculties often make them more unhappy than beasts, in which we find neither opinions, prejudices, vanities, nor follies, which every moment decide the welfare of man?