Men being thus imbued with the ridiculous opinion that every thing which they behold is created for themselves, have made it a point of religion to engross every thing, and to judge of its value by the profit which it brings. Accordingly they have invented notions which do them service in explaining the nature of things, and enable them to judge of good and evil, order and disorder, heat and cold, beauty and ugliness, &c. which are by no means what they imagine. Because they are able to frame their ideas in this way, they think that they are in a position to judge of praise and blame; of good and evil. They call that good which respects their divine worship, and turns to their own profit; and that which does neither the one nor the other they denominate evil; and because the ignorant are incapable of judging, and have no conception of any thing save through the medium of their imagination, which they mistake for judgment, they tell us that nothing can be learned from nature, and forthwith invent a particular arrangement of the world. In short they think that matters are ill or well constituted according to the facility or the difficulty which they have in conceiving of them when presented to them through the medium of their senses. People are best pleased with what gives least fatigue to the brain. These individuals have wisely resolved to prefer order to confusion, as if order were any thing else than a pure fiction of the imagination. Thus to say that the Deity has made every thing with order, is to pretend that it is in favour of the human imagination that he has created the world in a manner the most easy for it to form a conception of;--or, which is the same thing, that they know with certainty all the relations and all the designs of whatever exists; an assertion too absurd to merit any serious refutation. § 8.