the gods ordained everything for the use of man, in order to bind
man to themselves and obtain from him the highest honor. Hence
also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according
to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God
might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course
of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and
insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into
superstition, and took deep root in the human mind ; and for this
reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain
the final causes of things ; but in their endeavor to show that
nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to
man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods,
and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result :
among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some
hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, &c. : so they
declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at
some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in
their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by
infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of
pious and impious alike ; still they would not abandon their
inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such
contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were
ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of
ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning
and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that
God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a
doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the
human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished
another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and
properties of figures without regard to their final causes.