should evoke a lively sense of danger, and that this sense should cause the body to remove itself promptly out of reach of the blow.  All that would have come to pass without miracles, since there would have been general laws on this subject.  The system which we know by experience teaches us that the determination of the movement of certain bodies changes in pursuance of our desires.  It was therefore possible for a combination to be effected between our desires and the movement of certain bodies, whereby the nutritive juices were so modified that the good arrangement of our organs was never affected.’

355.  It is evident that M. Bayle believes that everything accomplished through general laws is accomplished without miracles.  But I have shown sufficiently that if the law is not founded on reasons and does not serve to explain the event through the nature of things, it can only be put into execution by a miracle.  If, for example, God had ordained that bodies must have a circular motion, he would have needed perpetual miracles, or the ministry of angels, to put this order into execution:  for that is contrary to the nature of motion, whereby the body naturally abandons the circular line to continue in the tangent straight line if nothing holds it [339] back.  Therefore it is not enough for God to ordain simply that a wound should excite an agreeable sensation:  natural means must be found for that purpose.  The real means whereby God causes the soul to be conscious of what happens in the body have their origin in the nature of the soul, which represents the bodies, and is so made beforehand that the representations which are to spring up one from another within it, by a natural sequence of thoughts, correspond to the changes in the body.

356.  The representation has a natural relation to that which is to be represented.  If God should have the round shape of a body represented by the idea of a square, that would be an unsuitable representation:  for there would be angles or projections in the representation, while all would be even and smooth in the original.  The representation often suppresses something in the objects when it is imperfect; but it can add nothing:  that would render it, not more than perfect, but false.  Moreover, the suppression is never complete in our perceptions, and there is in the representation, confused as it is, more than we see there.  Thus there is reason for supposing that the ideas of heat, cold, colours, etc., also only represent the small movements carried out in the organs, when one is conscious of these qualities, although the multiplicity and the diminutive character of these movements prevents their clear representation.  Almost in the same way it happens that we do not distinguish the blue and the yellow which play their part in the representation as well as in the composition of the green, when the microscope shows that what appears to be green is composed of yellow and blue parts.