LETTER CXIII. Usbek to Rhedi, at Venice.

THE world, Rhedi, is not incorruptible; the heavens themselves are not; the astronomers are eye-witnesses of their changes; which are indeed the natural effects of the universal motion of matter. The earth is subject, like the other planets, to the laws of motion: and she suffers within herself, a perpetual conflict among her own principles: the sea and land seem engaged in an eternal war; every instant produces new conjunctions. Mankind, in an abode so subject to changes, are in a state likewise uncertain: a hundred thousand causes may act, capable of destroying them, and much more of increasing or diminishing their number. I shall not mention to thee those particular catastrophes, so frequent among historians, which have destroyed cities and whole kingdoms: there are general ones, which have often put the human species within an inch of destruction. History is full of those universal plagues, which have, by turns, desolated the whole earth; of one, among others, that was so violent that it blasted the very roots of the plants, and infected the whole known world, to the very empire of Cathai: one degree more of corruption would perhaps, in a single day, have destroyed all human nature. It is not two centuries ago that the most shameful of all distempers was felt in Europe, Asia, and Africa; it wrought in a little time prodigious effects, that would have destroyed mankind, if it had continued its progress with the same fury. Depressed with disease from their birth, incapable of sustaining the weight of the duties of society, they must miserably have perished. What if the venom had been a little more exalted? and without doubt it would have become so, if they had not been

so happy as to find out so powerful a remedy as that which hath been discovered. This disease, perhaps, attacking the parts of generation would have affected generation itself. But why talk I of the destruction which might have happened to human nature? Hath it not in fact arrived? and did not the deluge reduce it to one single family? There are philosophers who maintain two creations; that of things, and that of man: they cannot conceive that matter and things have been created but six thousand years; that God deferred his works during all eternity, and did not use but yesterday his creative power. Was it because he could, or because he would not? But, if he could not at one time, neither could he at another. It must be then because he would not: but as there is no succession of time in God, if we admit that he willed any thing once, he willed it always, and from the beginning The former editions bad here as follows:—‘We must not therefore pretend to count the years of the world; the number of the grains of sand upon the sea-shore, is no more to be compared to them than one instant.’ ^†345 . However all historians mention a first father: they present us with the birth of human nature. Is it not natural to think that Adam was saved from some common destruction, as Noah was from the deluge; and that these great events have been frequent upon earth since the creation? But all these destructions have not been violent. We see many parts of the earth grown weary, as it were, of furnishing subsistence to man; how do we know if the whole earth hath not in it general causes, slow and imperceptible, of this weariness? I was willing to give thee these general ideas, before I answered more particularly to thy letter of the decrease of mankind, which hath happened within these seventeen or eighteen centuries. I shall show thee in a succeeding letter, that independent of physical causes, there are moral ones by which this effect may have been produced.

Paris, the 18th of the moon Chahban,
1718.