“There is no evil whereof some good is not born”

“There is no evil whereof some good is not born” is presented as a seductive maxim that converts an observation about consequences into a justification for choosing evil. In the novel’s opening defense of its portrayal of virtue under persecution, the narrator anticipates this reasoning as one of the false philosophies the narrative is designed to resist.

The Maxim as an Argument

The narrator introduces the saying through an imagined response to the conflict between suffering virtue and flourishing crime. A reader, he suggests, might borrow the angel Jesrad’s words in Zadig and infer that if evil gives rise to some good, then evil itself may be embraced as one means of producing that good. The maxim thus shifts from a claim about what may follow from evil to a license for deliberately doing evil.

That inference is the point of the warning. The passage does not offer the maxim as the narrator’s own ethical conclusion; it stages it as a sophistry that a person might use to make wrongdoing seem compatible with the general order of Nature. Once good consequences are treated as sufficient justification, the distinction between virtue and vice appears to lose its force.

Relation to the Novel’s Design

The opening frames the narrative as an answer to this reasoning. The narrator argues that depicting a sensitive, virtuous woman overwhelmed by misfortune can restore readers to righteousness, even when the wicked prosper. The story’s spectacle of suffering is therefore intended not to teach that evil is acceptable because it may serve some larger good, but to expose how readily that proposition can be twisted into permission to follow the wicked.

The maxim belongs to a wider contest over how to interpret a world in which virtue encounters hardship while crime enjoys prosperity. The narrator acknowledges that such a contrast may prompt the conclusion that it is safer to join the successful wicked than to remain among the virtuous who founder. By anticipating that conclusion, the passage makes the reader’s interpretation part of the book’s moral problem: an account of evil’s consequences can either strengthen resistance to vice or supply an argument for surrendering to it.