The world of nations is in fact a human creation [ . . . ] Yet without doubt this world was created by the mind of providence, which is often different, sometimes contrary, and always superior to the particular goals which people have set for themselves. Instead, to preserve the human race on the earth, providence uses people’s limited goals as a means of attaining greater ones. Thus, people seek to satisfy their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, but they establish the chastity of marriage, from which families arise. Fathers seek to exercise immoderate lateral authority over their clients, but they subject them to the civil powers which create cities. The ruling orders of the nobility seek to abuse their lordly freedom over the plebeians, but they become slaves to the laws which create popular liberty. Free peoples seek to free themselves of laws, but become the subjects of monarchs. Monarchs seek to strengthen their rule by debasing their subjects in every kind of dissolution and vice, but they prepare them to endure slavery under stronger nations. Nations seek to disband, but their fragmented peoples take refuge in isolated regions from which nations rise again, like the phoenix. In all these cases, the agent is mind, since people have acted with intelligence. It was not fate, for they acted by choice. It was not chance, for the results of such consistent actions are always the same.