350. This also settles M. Bayle's difficulty, for he fears that, if God is always determinate, Nature could dispense with him and bring about that same effect which is attributed to him, through the necessity of the order of things. That would be true if the laws of motion for instance, and all the rest, had their source in a geometrical necessity of efficient causes; but in the last analysis one is obliged to resort to something depending upon final causes and upon what is fitting. This also utterly destroys the most plausible reasoning of the Naturalists. Dr. Johann Joachim Becher, a German physician, well known for his books on chemistry, had composed a prayer which looked like getting him into trouble. It began: 'O sancta[335] mater natura, aeterne rerum ordo'. And it ended by saying that this Nature must forgive him his errors, since she herself was their cause. But the nature of things, if taken as without intelligence and without choice, has in it nothing sufficiently determinant. Herr Becher did not sufficiently take into account that the Author of things (_natura naturans_) must be good and wise, and that we can be evil without complicity on his part in our acts of wickedness. When a wicked man exists, God must have found in the region of possibles the idea of such a man forming part of that sequence of things, the choice of which was demanded by the greatest perfection of the universe, and in which errors and sins are not only punished but even repaired to greater advantage, so that they contribute to the greatest good. 351. M. Bayle, however, has extended the free choice of God a little too far. Speaking of the Peripatetic Strato (_Reply to the Questions of a Provincial_, vol. III, ch. 180, p. 1239), who asserted that everything had been brought forth by the necessity of a nature devoid of intelligence, he maintains that this philosopher, on being asked why a tree has not the power to form bones and veins, might have asked in his turn: Why has matter precisely three dimensions? why should not two have sufficed for it? why has it not four? 'If one had answered that there can be neither more nor less than three dimensions he would have demanded the cause of this impossibility.' These words lead one to believe that M. Bayle suspected that the number of the dimensions of matter depended upon God's choice, even as it depended upon him to cause or not to cause trees to produce animals. Indeed, how do we know whether there are not planetary globes or earths situated in some more remote place in the universe where the fable of the Barnacle-geese of Scotland (birds that were said to be born of trees) proves true, and even whether there are not countries where one could say: _... populos umbrosa creavit_ _Fraxinus, et foeta viridis puer excidit alno?_