The fable is very ingenious; it would be still more so if Crantor had said that the sovereign good consists in the combination of the four rivals, Virtue, Health, Wealth, and Pleasure; but this fable neither does, nor can, resolve the absurd question about the sovereign good. Virtue is not a good; it is a duty. It is of a different nature; of a superior order. It has nothing to do with painful or with agreeable sensations. A virtuous man, laboring under stone and gout, without aid, without friends, destitute of necessaries, persecuted, and chained down to the floor by a voluptuous tyrant who enjoys good health, is very wretched; and his insolent persecutor, caressing a new mistress on his bed of purple, is very happy. Say, if you please, that the persecuted sage is preferable to the persecuting profligate; say that you admire the one and detest the other; but confess that the sage in chains is scarcely less than mad with rage and pain; if he does not himself admit that he is so, he completely deceives you; he is a charlatan. GOOD. _Of Good and Evil, Physical and Moral._ We here treat of a question of the greatest difficulty and importance. It relates to the whole of human life. It would be of much greater consequence to find a remedy for our evils; but no remedy is to be discovered, and we are reduced to the sad necessity of tracing out their origin. With respect to this origin, men have disputed ever since the days of Zoroaster, and in all probability they disputed on the same subject long before him. It was to explain the mixture of good and evil that they conceived the idea of two principles--Oromazes, the author of light, and Arimanes, the author of darkness; the box of Pandora; the two vessels of Jupiter; the apple eaten by Eve; and a variety of other systems. The first of dialecticians, although not the first of philosophers, the illustrious Bayle, has clearly shown how difficult it is for Christians who admit one only God, perfectly good and just, to reply to the objections of the Manichæans who acknowledge two Gods--one good, and the other evil. The foundation of the system of the Manichæans, with all its antiquity, was not on that account more reasonable. Lemmas, susceptible of the most clear and rigid geometrical demonstrations, should alone have induced any men to the adoption of such a theorem as the following: "There are two necessary beings, both supreme, both infinite, both equally powerful, both in conflict with each other, yet, finally, agreeing to pour out upon this little planet--one, all the treasures of his beneficence, and the other all the stores of his malice." It is in vain that the advocates of this hypothesis attempt to explain by it the cause of good and evil: even the fable of Prometheus explains it better. Every hypothesis which only serves to assign a reason for certain things, without being, in addition to that recommendation, established upon indisputable principles, ought invariably to be rejected.