except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are, they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of their horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is not always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed to death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death in prolonged anguish?[338] The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part. Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness, sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation of the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man; but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the preservation of the human race that there should be a circulation of substance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap of an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do, by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii, and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of men." (p. 305.)