PART I: CONCERNING GOD.
Page: 34

inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such
contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were
ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition
of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning
and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that
God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a
doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the
human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished
another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and
properties of figures without regard to their final causes.
There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides
mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed
to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge
of the truth.

I have now sufficiently explained my first point. There is no
need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in
view, and that final causes are mere human figments. This, I
think, is already evident enough, both from the causes and
foundations on which I have shown such prejudice to be based,
and also from Prop. xvi., and the Corollary of Prop. xxxii.,
and, in fact, all those propositions in which I have shown, that
everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with
the utmost perfection. However, I will add a few remarks in
order to overthrow this doctrine of a final cause utterly. That
which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice
versa: it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and
that which is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect.
Passing over the questions of cause and priority as
self-evident, it is plain from Props. xxi., xxii., xxiii. that
the effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God;
the effect which requires for its production several
intermediate causes is, in that respect, more imperfect. But if
those things which were made immediately by God were made to
enable him to attain his end, then the things which come after,
for the sake of which the first were made, are necessarily the