Another _petitio principii_ still more evident. In the first place, you are compelled, in order legitimately to draw justice from the will of God, to suppose that this will is just, or I defy any one to show that this will alone can ever form the basis of justice. Moreover, evidently you cannot comprehend what a just will of God is, if you do not already possess the idea of justice. This idea, then, does not come from that of the will of God. On the one hand, you may have, and you do have, the idea of justice, without understanding the will of God; on the other, you cannot conceive the justice of the divine will, without having conceived justice elsewhere. Are not these reasons sufficient, I pray you, to conclude that the sole will of God is not for us the principle of the idea of the good? And now, behold the natural consummation of the ethical system that we are examining:--the just and the unjust are what it has pleased God to declare such, by attaching to them the rewards and punishments of another life. The divine will manifests itself here only by an arbitrary order; it adds to this order promises and threats. But to what human faculty are addressed the promise and threat of the chastisements and the rewards of another life? To the same one that in this life fears pain and seeks pleasure, shuns unhappiness and desires happiness, that is to say, to sensibility animated by imagination, that is to say, again, to what is most changing in each of us and most different in the human species. The joys and sufferings of another life excite in us the two most vivid but most mobile passions, hope and fear. Every thing influences our fears and hopes,--aye, health, the passing cloud, a ray of the sun, a cup of coffee, a thousand causes of this kind. I have known men, even philosophers, who on certain days hoped more, and other days less. And such a basis some would give to ethics! Then it is doing nothing else than proposing for human conduct an interested motive. The calculation which I obey is purer, if you will; the happiness that one makes me hope for is greater; but I see in that no justice that obligates me, no virtue and no vice in me, who know or do not know how to make this calculation, not having a head as strong as that of Pascal,[214] who yield to or resist those fears and hopes according to the deposition of my sensibility and my imagination, over which I have no power. Finally, the pains and pleasures of the future life are instituted on the ground of punishments and rewards. Now, none but actions in themselves good or bad can be rewarded and punished. If already there is in itself no good, no law that in conscience we are obligated to follow, there is neither merit nor demerit; recompense is not then recompense, nor penalty penalty, since they are such only on the condition of being the complement and the sanction of the idea of the good. Where this idea does not pre-exist, there remain, instead of