hurricanes, volcanoes, wars, plagues, famines, diseases, death, are as
necessary to her eternal march as the beneficent heat of the sun, the
serenity of the atmosphere, the gentle showers of spring, plentiful
years, peace, health, harmony, life: vice and virtue, darkness and
light, and science are equally necessary; the one are not benefits, the
other are not evils, except for those beings whose happiness they
influence by either favouring or deranging their peculiar mode of
existence. _The whole cannot be miserable, but it may contain unhappy
individuals._

Nature, then, distributes with the same hand that which is called
_order_, and that which is called _disorder_; that which is called
_pleasure_, and that which is called _pain_: in short, she diffuses by
the necessity of her existence, good and evil in the world we inhabit.
Let not man, therefore, either arraign her bounty, or tax her with
malice; let him not imagine that his feeble cries, his weak
supplications, can never arrest her colossal power, always acting after
immutable laws; let him submit silently to his condition; and when he
suffers, let him not seek a remedy by recurring to chimeras that his own
distempered imagination has created; let him draw from the stores of
Nature herself, the remedies which she offers for the evil she brings
upon him: if she sends him diseases, let him search in her bosom for
those salutary productions to which she has given birth, which will cure
them: if she gives him errors, she also furnishes him with experience to
counteract them; in truth, she supplies him with an antidote suitable to
destroy their fatal effects. If she permits man to groan under the
pressure of his vices, beneath the load of his follies, she also shews
him in virtue, a sure remedy for his infirmities: if the evils that some
societies experience are necessary, when they shall have become too
incommodious they will be irresistibly obliged to search for those