These postulata
being admitted," added he, taking pen, ink, and paper, and drawing
a parallelogram, "let youth be represented by the right line, a b,
and discretion by another right line, c d, parallel to the former.
Complete the parallelogram, a b c d, and let the point of intersection,
b, represent perdition. Let passion, represented under the letter
c, have a motion in the direction c a. At the same time, let another
motion be communicated to it, in the direction c d, it will proceed
in the diagonal c b, and describe it in the same time that it would
have described the side c a, by the first motion, or the side, c d,
by the second. To understand the demonstration of this corollary,
we must premise this obvious principle, that when a body is acted
upon by a motion of power parallel to a right line given in position,
this power, or motion, has no effect to cause the body to approach
towards that line, or recede from it, but to move in a line parallel
to a right line only; as appears from the second law of motion:
therefore c a being parallel to d b--"
His pupil having listened to him thus far, could contain himself
no longer, but interrupted the investigation with a loud laugh, and
told him that his postulata put him in mind of a certain learned
and ingenious gentleman, who undertook to disprove the existence
of natural evil, and asked no other datum on which to found his
demonstration, but an acknowledgment that "everything that is, is
right.
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