Others tell us that the first female was
made of clay; that she was called Pandora, because every necessary gift,
qualification, or endowment, was given to her by the gods, but that she
received from Jupiter, at the same time, a box from which, when opened,
a multitude of disorders sprung, and that these spread themselves
immediately afterwards among all of the human race. Thus it appears,
whatever authorities we consult, that those which may be termed the
evils of life existed in the earliest times. And what does subsequent
history, combined with our own experience, tell us, but that these have
been continued, or that they have come down in different degrees through
successive generations of men, in all the known countries of the
universe, to the present day?
But though the inequality visible in the different conditions of life,
and the passions interwoven into our nature, (both which have been
allotted to us for wise purposes, and without which we could not easily
afford a proof of the existence of that, which is denominated virtue,)
have a tendency to produce vice and wretchedness among us, yet we see,
in this our constitution, what may operate partially as preventives and
corrective of them.
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