possible worlds, and the evil that it contains affords no argument against the goodness of God.
This argument apparently satisfied the queen of Prussia. Her serfs continued to suffer the evil,
while she continued to enjoy the good, and it was comforting to be assured by a great philosopher
that this was just and right.
Leibniz's solution of the problem of evil, like most of his other popular doctrines, is logically
possible, but not very convincing. A Manichæan might retort that this is the worst of all possible
worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might
say, was created by a wicked demiurge, who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make
sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will. The demiurge, he
might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked;
for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good
men existed. I am not advocating this opinion, which I consider fantastic; I am only saying that it
is no more fantastic than Leibniz's theory. People wish to think the universe good, and will be
lenient to bad arguments proving that it is so, while bad arguments proving that it is bad are
closely scanned. In fact, of course, the world is partly good and partly bad, and no "problem of
evil" arises unless this obvious fact is denied.
I come now to Leibniz's esoteric philosophy, in which we find reasons for much that seems
arbitrary or fantastic in his popular expositions, as well as an interpretation of his doctrines which,
if it had become generally known, would have made them much less acceptable. It is a remarkable
fact that he so imposed upon subsequent students of philosophy that most of the editors who
published selections from the immense mass of his manuscripts preferred what supported the
received interpretation of his system, and rejected as unimportant essays which prove him to have
been a far more profound thinker than he wished to be thought. Most of the texts upon which we
must rely for an understanding of his esoteric doctrine were first published in 1901 or 1903, in
two works by Louis Couturat. One of these was even headed by Leibniz with the remark: "Here I
have made enormous progress." But in spite of this, no editor thought it worth printing until
Leibniz had been dead for nearly two centuries. It is true that