and far more connected view, of Leibnitz's whole system of metaphysics and theology than from all his other writings put together. From the inseparable connexion which his principal speculations in both these domains of science maintained in his own mind, (however we may fail to perceive it, or even doubt whether he always clearly perceived it himself,) and from the wide circuit of thought in which he habitually indulged, almost all his characteristic doctrines come under review in one part or other of this singular work. Not only have we in it his theory of moral and physical necessity, (which might be looked for,) but his doctrine of monads, his pre-established harmony, his law of continuity, his sufficient reason, his notion of the origin of souls, of generation and dissolution, of space and time.

As to his main hypothesis, constructed to account for the origin of evil, and justify the ways of God to man,' that has long ago been exploded as unsatisfactory; but it is so, only for the reasons which have made every other attempt of mortals to penetrate that great mystéry equally unsatisfactory. We believe that no man ever rose from the perusal of any work on the subject, (if we except the author,) without feeling the conviction that it lies beyond the limits of the human understanding, and that we are absolutely without data for its solution. That evil should have been permitted to enter the universe under the absolute dominion of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, is a mystery towards the explanation of which man has not made the very smallest conceivable advance. When we are told that this is the best of all possible worlds, meaning thereby, as Leibnitz takes care to explain, the Universe, that the absolute exclusion of evil was impossible, and that the least possible mixture of it has been admitted, the appeal, in fact, is to faith and not to reason. The answer to the argument is, it may be so; we may perhaps even conjecture some grounds of probability for thinking it is so; but who shall assure us of it?' As a matter of pure reasoning, the argument against this hypothesis may be put in a form which we may defy all philosophy to encounter. First, would not a universe without any evil at all be preferable to a universe with some, however little, to say nothing of a universe in which it cannot be said there is very little ? and, Secondly, can we say that we see any reason why such a universe could not be constructed by irresistible power, under the guidance of an infinite wisdom, and both impelled by a goodness equally infinite? We affirm that the reason of men can reply to the first of these questions only in the affirmative, and to the second only in the negative. Leibnitz, on the other hand, says no' to the first,

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and 'yes' to the second. But few will discern his ratio sufficiens in either answer. It is evident that he, like every other man who pretends to solve the mystery, arrives at his conclusions by a gross petitio principii ; or rather the whole work is an example of the boregov góregov. The very problem is to reconcile the consistency of the attributes of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness with the phenomena of physical and moral evil; and Leibnitz solves it, by saying in effect that God is infinitely wise and good, and therefore cannot but have chosen out of all possibilities, the best; therefore a universe free from all evil, or even from less than exists, is a contradiction-the very thing, that is, which is required to be shown.

It is very possible that evil may be absolutely inevitable,—we believe so, because it has been permitted ;-it is even possible that we might see this, if we knew all, and that, when we ask that a universe of sentient, intelligent, responsible beings should be created from which evil should be infallibly excluded, we are demanding an impossibility. All we mean is, that this cannot be proved, but is always taken for granted, in every pretended solution of the difficulty. To the considerations which mitigate the difficulties of the subject, we are not blind, but we deny that they remove them. We are promised a cure of our malady, and we are treated with palliatives; we are told that we shall walk in sunlight, and we find ourselves only in starlight. So is it with the Theodicée.

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That he is in fact appealing not to reason but to faith, Leibnitz himself often virtually confesses, and never more explicitly than in the following passage:- Il est vrai qu'on peut s'imaginer 'des mondes possibles, sans péché et sans malheur, et on en pourroit faire, comme des Romans, des Utopies, des Severam'bes; mais ces mêmes mondes seroient d'ailleurs fort inférieurs en bien au nôtre : je ne saurois vous le faire voir en détail: car puis-je connoitre, et puis-je vous représenter, des infinis, et les 'comparer ensemble? mais vous le devez juger avec moi ab effectu, puisque Dieu a choisi ce monde tel qu'il est.'* After this, one is only puzzled to think how it was possible to fill two volumes on the subject.

It is curious to observe how apt are all writers on this subject to fall into the same fallacy, and beg the question in dispute-even though they may clearly perceive the rock on which others have wrecked their logic. Thus, Lord Brougham, after having, in perhaps the most profound of his writings, very clearly exposed

* Essais sur la Bonté de Dieu, Part I. § 10.

the fallacy of Archbishop King and others;-after fairly acknowledging that the problem is insoluble, and stating with much lucidity and beauty the mitigations founded on the immense preponderance of indications of benevolent design,-falls into precisely the same error, the moment he ceases to demolish theories, and begins himself to build one. After admitting that death is an evil, he says, That man might have been created 'immortal is not denied; but if it were the will of the Deity to 'form a limited being, and to place him upon the earth for only ' a certain period of time, his death was the necessary consequence of this determination.' Certainly: but why it should have been the will of God to create-not a limited being, for that was inevitable-but a being subject to death and pain, is the very question ;-not whether, if God determined to create such a being, his death was inevitable. In such a way we might get rid of the whole difficulty of the great problem, by saying, that if it were the will of God to admit evil into the Universe, its admission was the necessary consequence of that determination. Again, his Lordship says, (p. 72,) To create sen'tient beings devoid of all feelings of affection, was no doubt possible to Omnipotence; but to endow those beings with such 'feelings as should give the constant gratification derived from 'the benevolent affections, and yet to make them wholly indif'ferent to the loss of the objects of those affections, was not possible even for Omnipotence; because it was a contradiction in terms equivalent to making a thing both exist and not exist at one and the same time.' Čertainly: but, as before, how is it shown to be necessary that these beings should have been subjected to such loss, or a contradiction to suppose them exempt from it? for this is the very question on which we want light. This sharp-sighted writer has, in a word, been betrayed into the very sophism which he has himself so clearly exposed in Archbishop King, (p. 34.) The difficult question then,' says the Archbishop, whence comes evil? is not unanswerable. For it ' arises from the very nature and constitution of created beings, ' and could not be avoided without a contradiction.'

But, though we certainly cannot demonstrate that this is the best of all possible worlds,' and that it was necessary that some evil should be admitted, we are far enough from affirming that that faith to which, as we have said, the appeal is sure to be ultimately relegated, is a faith entirely without reason; or that it is destitute of those grounds of probability upon which alone an

* Dissertations on Paley, vol. ii. p. 71.

intelligent reliance on the truths, whether of natural or revealed theology, can be maintained. And here the immensely prevailing character of benevolent design which pervades the Universe, contrasted with the fact that evil always appears either simply concomitant, or involved as a consequence, never as an ultimate end, and that an apparent evil is often found to be connected with real good, is of incalculable benefit as suggesting an approximate solution. And this confidence is yet further increased, when we see that in proportion as our knowledge advances, many of the ancient objections against the wisdom, and some against the goodness of the constitution of the Universe disappear ;-that they were in fact nothing more than the offspring of ignorance. We thus learn to believe that ail would vanish in like manner if we were but omniscient. The course of reasoning is much the same as that by which we experimentally establish the first law of motion; it is but an approximate solution, yet conclusive: or we are led to suppose that the anomalies which we behold, are like those regressions of the planets which so much perplexed the early astronomers, and which arise from our seeing them from a false centre of observation. Place us in the true centre of the system, and, as science has now shown, all these irregularities disappear. Thus may it also be in the moral world.

́All discord, harmony ill understood,

All partial evil, universal good.'

But, to believe this is one thing; to prove it, is another.

So strong, however, is the conviction arising from these presumptions, in every well-constituted mind, that probably no man ever reflected, in moments of health, on the exquisite organization of his body and mind, and their evident adaptation to promote his happiness, or looked from them outwards and upwards upon the earth and the sky, and saw how there too almost every thing was adjusted to that organization; that every object was accommodated to our senses, and every sense an inlet of delight; how to the eye all is beauty, and to the ear all music,-without feeling a triumphant consciousness that the Universe must be under the dominion of paternal love; without recoiling from the supposition, as from a most revolting absurdity, that such an Universe can have been the product of malevolence; or that if so, such power and such wisdom should so signally have failed of the end. Nor, probably, has there ever been a sceptic-even he who has brooded longest and most darkly on this most mournful mystery-who has not at times joyfully surrendered himself to this instinctive consciousness,- and felt, with a gush of rapture, that it has at once swept away, as with a pure and healthful

breeze, the vapours which a hypochondriacal metaphysics had diffused over his soul. We confess that we lay more stress upon this instinctive consciousness, for baffling this difficulty, than on the subtlest and profoundest metaphysical reasonings which man ever framed.

Apart from his main hypothesis, Leibnitz states the alleviations of this overwhelming difficulty, and the probabilities which may justify the supposition that partial evil is universal good,' with characteristic comprehensiveness; and has illustrated them with much vivacity. Thus he remarks, that many things which once appeared only evil, appeared so only to a shallow philosophy, and that as science enlarged, the asserted anomaly vanished; that some infusion of evil may be necessary to give us the highest possible appreciation of the good; as only he who knows what sickness is, can enjoy the exquisite sensations of health in all their rapture,-a point which he illustrates with a liveliness which reminds the reader of the celebrated passage at the close of Paley's Treatise on Natural Theology;'-that two ingredients, one bitter and one sweet, in the cup of destiny, may make a more pleasant draught than the sweet alone. Un peu d'acide, d'acre, ou d'amer, plait souvent mieux que du sucre; les ombres rehaus'sent les couleurs; et même une dissonance, placée où il faut, donne du relief à l'harmonie.'*

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Leibnitz makes the remark, that each man in effect admits that his share of good in life preponderates over the ill ;—a fact which he supports by the universal reluctance of men to die; and in reply to the objection that no man is willing to live his life over again, he makes this original and just observation, that no one would object to take a new lease of life with but a new 'series of events to vary it.' 'On se contenteroit de varier, sans 'exiger une meilleure condition que celle où l'on avoit été.'†

Nor does he forget to insist very largely on the fact, (an essential point in his hypothesis, maintaining as it does, that some evil was inevitable,) that the amount of evil in the whole Universe, embracing the ample domains of innumerable worlds, the vast civitas Dei, may be as nothing compared with the amount of good; even though that evil may be absolutely fearful in extent, and eternal in duration. The great speculatist treats this tremendous theme with all the coolness of a veteran geometer. The ratio of the good to the evil is every thing with him; he deals with the latter, just as he would with a vanishing quantity in his Differential Calculus. It is sufficient with him, that, be the evil ever so great, the good is infinitely greater; and thus disease,

* Essais sur la Bonté de Dieu, &c. Part I. § 12. † Ibid. Part I. § 13.