, the ideas of obedience and disobedience,
merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under
it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly
declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes.
Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the
following manner. He conceives that the system of the universe has been
arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into
being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details,
as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action
of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though
necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a
'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary
agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions,
entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is,
whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite
qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can
co-exist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or
of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters
from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can incur guilt,
their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise
than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us;
yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a
theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained
the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the _Harmonie Pre-etablie_
might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful.
It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has
no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world
may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of
its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and
although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and
wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with
the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of
the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity
of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because
it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark
subject, when nothin