606 GOTTFRIEDLEIBNIZ
and the manifestation of His justice reduce, as well as His mercy and His perfections
generally, and finally that immense depth of His riches Paul’s soul was enchanted with.
- USEFULNESS OFTHESEPRINCIPLES INMATTERS OFPIETY
ANDRELIGION
For the rest, it seems that the thoughts we have just explained, particularly the grand prin-
ciple of the perfection of the operations of God and the notion of the substance including
all the events with all their circumstances, far from harming religion, serve to confirm it,
removing very great difficulties, inflaming souls with a divine love and raising minds to
the knowledge of incorporeal substances to a much greater extent than the hypotheses we
have seen up to now. For it is clear that just as thoughts depend on our substance, all other
substances depend on God, that God is all in all, and that He is intimately united with all
creatures (though to the extent of their perfection), and that He alone determines them
externally by His influence. And if to act is to determine directly, it can be said in this
sense, in the language of metaphysics, that God operates on me and is alone able to do me
good or ill, while other substances are nothing but occasional causes, for the reason that as
God considers all of them, He distributes His acts of goodness and obliges them to con-
form to each other. Also, God alone makes the connection and communication of sub-
stances, and it is by Him that phenomena of any given substance meet and fit with those of
the others, and consequently that there is reality in our perceptions. But in practice action
is attributed to particular occasional causes in the sense explained above, because it is not
always necessary to mention the universal cause in particular cases.
It is seen also that every substance has a perfect spontaneity (which in intelligent
substances becomes liberty): that everything that happens to it is a consequence of its
ideas or being, and that it is determined by nothing but God alone. That is why a person
of noble mind whose sanctity is greatly revered used to say that the soul must often
think as if there were only God and it in the world.
Now nothing makes immortality more completely comprehensible than this inde-
pendence and extent of the soul. It protects it absolutely from all external things, since
it alone constitutes the whole world and, with God, suffices to itself. It is also impossi-
ble for it to perish other than by annihilation, and impossible for the world (of which it
is a living and perpetual expression) to destroy itself. Hence, it is not possible for the
changes in that extended mass called our body to do anything to our soul, or for the
disappearance of that body to destroy what is indivisible.
- EXPLANATION OF THEUNION OFSOUL ANDBODY
SOMETHINGONCETHOUGHTINEXPLICABLE ORMIRACULOUS,
AND THEORIGIN OFCONFUSEDPERCEPTIONS
Also clear is the unexpected solution of that great mystery of the union of soul and body,
i.e. how it happens that the actions and passions of the one are accompanied by the
actions and passions, or rather appropriate phenomena, of the other. For there is no way
of conceiving any influence of the one on the other, and it is unreasonable simply to have
recourse to the extraordinary operation of the universal cause in something ordinary and
particular. But here is the true reason. We have said that everything happening to the soul
and to every substance is a consequence of its notion. Hence the very idea or essence of
the soul makes all its appearances or perceptions arise spontaneously out of its own