necessarily has for himself; a predilection that will subsist until
reason, aided by experience, in pointing out the truth, shall have
rectified his errors.

Thus, whenever man is contented, whenever every thing is in order with
respect to himself, he either admires or loves the causes to which he
believes he is indebted for his welfare; when he becomes discontented
with his mode of existence, he either fears or hates the cause which he
supposes has produced these afflicting effects. But his welfare
confounds itself with his existence; it ceases to make itself felt when
it has become habitual, when it has been of long continuance; he then
thinks it is inherrent to his essence; he concludes from it that he is
formed to be always happy; he finds it natural that every thing should
concur to the maintenance of his being. It is by no means the same when
he experiences a mode of existence that is displeasing to himself: the
man who suffers is quite astonished at the change which his taken place
in his machine; he judges it to be contrary to the entire of nature,
because it is incommodious to his own particular nature; he, imagines
those events by which he is wounded, to be contrary to the order of
things; he believes that nature is deranged every time she does not
procure for him that mode of feeling which is suitable to his ideas: he
concludes from these suppositions that nature, or rather that the agent
who moves her; is irritated against him.

It is thus that man, almost insensible to good, feels evil in a very
lively manner; the first he believes natural, the other he thinks
opposed to nature. He is either ignorant, or forgets, that he
constitutes part of a whole, formed by the assemblage of substances, of
which some are analogous, others heterogeneous; that the various beings
of which nature is composed, are endowed with a variety of properties,