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By Root 3182 0

statements that have only to do with essence, not with existence, are either always true or never true. Those that are always true are called 'eternal truths'. The gist of the argument is that truths are part of the contents of minds, and that an eternal truth must be part of the content of an eternal mind. There is already an argument not unlike this in Plato, where he deduces immortality from the eternity of the ideas. But in Leibniz the argument is more developed. He holds that the ultimate reason for contingent truths must be found in necessary truths. The argument here is as in the cosmological argument: there must be a reason for the whole contingent world, and this reason cannot itself be contingent, but must be sought among eternal truths. But a reason for what exists must itself exist; therefore eternal truths must, in some sense, exist, and they can only exist as thoughts in the mind of God. This argument is really only another form of the cosmological argument. It is, however, open to the further objection that a truth can hardly be said to 'exist' in a mind which apprehends it.

The argument from the pre-established harmony, as Leibniz states it, is only valid for those who accept his windowless monads which all mirror the universe. The argument is that, since all the clocks keep time with each other without any causal interaction, there must have been a single outside Cause that regulated all of them. The difficulty, of course, is the one that besets the whole monadology: if the monads never interact, how does any one of them know that there are any others? What seems like mirroring the universe may be merely a dream. In fact, if Leibniz is right, it is merely a dream, but he has ascertained somehow that all the monads have similar dreams at the same time. This, of course, is fantastic, and would never have seemed credible but for the previous history of Cartesianism.

Leibniz's argument, however, can be freed from dependence on his peculiar metaphysic, and transformed into what is called the argument from design. This argument contends that, on a survey of the known world, we find things which cannot plausibly be explained as the product of blind natural forces, but are much more reasonably to be regarded as evidences of a beneficent purpose.

This argument has no formal logical defect; its premisses are empirical, and its conclusion professes to be reached in accordance with the usual canons of empirical inference. The question whether it is to be accepted or not turns, therefore, not on general metaphysical questions, but on comparatively detailed considerations. There is one important difference between this argument and the others, namely, that the God whom (if valid) it demonstrates need not have all the usual metaphysical attributes. He need not be omnipotent or omniscient; He may be only vastly wiser and more powerful than we are. The evils in the world may be due to His limited power. Some modern theologians have made use of these possibilities in forming their conception of God. But such speculations are remote from the philosophy of Leibniz, to which we must now return.

One of the most characteristic features of that philosophy is the doctrine of many possible worlds. A world is 'possible' if it does not contradict the laws of logic. There are an infinite number of possible worlds, all of which God contemplated before creating the actual world. Being good, God decided to create the best of the possible worlds, and He considered that one to be the best which had the greatest excess of good over evil. He could have created a world containing no evil, but it would not have been so good as the actual world. That is because some great goods are logically bound up with certain evils. To take a trivial illustration, a drink of cold water when you are very thirsty on a hot day may give you such great pleasure that you think the previous thirst, though painful, was worth enduring, because without it the subsequent enjoyment could not have been so great. For theology, it is not such illustrations that are