The truth in this case was not all sadness. In the last portion of the essay of 1798 Malthus expounds an argument which he afterwards reproduced in later editions with a more terrestrial application. He uses the style of Paley and the Apologists, and he tries to discover the final cause of the principle of population, on metaphysical lines that were followed by Mr. Sumner nearly twenty years afterwards, when the discussion had taken a new turn.[60] The question is how to reconcile the suffering produced by the principle of population with the goodness of God. Malthus answers that the difficulty is only one part of the general problem of evil, the difference between this part and the rest being that in this case we see farther into the causes; and it is therefore the easier for us to justify the ways of God to man. “Evil exists not to create despair but activity.”[61] We ought not to reason from God to nature, but from nature to God; to know how God works, let us observe how nature works. We shall then find that nature sends all sentient creatures through a long and painful process, by which they gain new qualities and powers, presumably fitting them for a better place than they have in this world. This world and this life are therefore in all probability “the mighty process of God,” not indeed for the mere “probation” of man (for that would imply that his Maker was suspicious of him, or ignorant of what was in him), but for the “creation and formation” of the human mind out of the torpor and corruption of dead matter,[62] “to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay.” The varied influences of life are the forming hand of the Creator, and they are infinitely diverse, for (in spite of Solomon) there is nothing old under the sun.[63] Difficulties generate talents.[64] “The first awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body;” it is these that rouse the intellect of the infant and sharpen the wits of the savage. Not leisure but necessity is the mother of invention: ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρες.