Gottfried Leibniz

“ If God delights in everyone's happiness, why doesn't He make everyone happy? If He loves everyone, why does He damn so many? If God is just, why does He seem so unfair, making out of the same clay (as it were) some vessels for honour and others for shame? And if God knowingly allows and tolerates sin in the world, when He could eliminate it, isn't He then responsible for the sin? Indeed, isn't God the instigator of all sin, since He created everything such that sin would result? ”

“ These modern thinkers insist upon certain hardly tenable subtleties, for they imagine that nothing is so perfect that there might not have been something more perfect. This is an error. They think, indeed, that they are thus safeguarding the liberty of God. As if it were not the highest liberty to act in perfection according to the sovereign reason. For to think that God acts in anything without having any reason for his willing, even if we overlook the fact that such action seems impossible, is an opinion which conforms little to God’s glory. ”

“ But there must also be a sufficient reason for contingent truths, or those of fact,—that is, for the series of things diffused through the universe of created objects—where the resolution into particular reasons might run into a detail without limits, on account of the immense variety of objects and the division of bodies ad infinitum. There is an infinity of figures and of movements, present and past, which enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and there is an infinity of trifling inclinations and dispositions, past and present, of my soul, which enter into the final cause. ”

“ Indeed, the less he could check the rushing torrent of events displeasing him, the more he would be tormented. But such suffering almost becomes a perverse pleasure; the wretched almost delight to find that they are tormented. Even among the living, the unhappy slander the blessed whom they envy, for no other reason than to be indignant that such inept people (in their opinion) should possess so many good things. But thus they make their own torments more abundant and their pain more wild; they also distort their envy to make it seem more reasonable. ”

“ You asked me, "What was the reason for his damnation?" to which I replied, "The reason was the condition of the dying man, namely the burning hatred of God in which he died." For since the soul is not open to new, external sensations after death (when the body is returned) the soul sticks to its last thoughts. These do not change, but are intensified in death. But hating God, Who is the happiest being, leads to the greatest pain, since hatred means to suffer pain because of the hated one's happiness, just as love means to rejoice in the beloved's happiness. ”

“ Finally, under this perfect government, there will be no good action without reward, no bad action without punishment, and everything must result for the well-being of the good, that is, of those who are not discontented in this great State, who, after having done their duty, trust in providence, and who love and imitate as they ought the author of all good, pleasing themselves with the contemplation of his perfections,—according to the nature of truly pure love, which takes pleasure in the happiness of the loved one. ”

“ As I do not wish to judge people in ill part I bring no accusation against our new philosophers who pretend to banish final causes from physics, but I am nevertheless obliged to avow that the consequences of such a banishment appear to me dangerous, especially when joined to that position which I refuted at the beginning of this treatise. That position seemed to go the length of discarding final causes entirely as though God proposed no end and no good in his activity, or as if good were not to be the object of his will. ”

“ For what does it matter if we reconcile sins with divine goodness, if sins cannot be reconciled with our freedom? What good does it do to acquit God, if the guilty are acquitted with Him? How do we profit, if in releasing the divine will, we render every will powerless? For I ask you, what is human freedom, if everything we are is the result of external things, if all our desires are determined by them, if a predestined logical sequence rules over our thoughts, the mere by-product of interacting atoms? ”

“ But at the present day, when, by accurate investigations of plants, insects and animals, they have become aware that the organic bodies of nature are never produced from chaos or from putrefaction, but always from seed, in which undoubtedly there had been a preformation; it has been inferred that not only the organic body existed in that seed before conception, but also a soul in that body—in one word, the animal itself—and that, by the act of conception, this animal is merely disposed to a grand transformation, to become an animal of another species. ”

“ I believe that those who are careful thinkers will decide favorably for our principles because of this single reason, viz., that they are able to see in what consists the relation between the soul and the body, a parallelism which appears inexplicable in any other way. We can also see that the perceptions of our senses even when they are clear must necessarily contain certain confused elements, for as all the bodies in the universe are in sympathy, ours receives the impressions of all the others, and while our senses respond to everything, our soul cannot pay attention to every particular. ”

“ So there you have an explanation for an amazing paradox. I maintain, not only is no one damned unless they desire it, but also that no one remains damned unless they desire it. For no one is damned unless they damn themselves; the damned are never wholly damned, but always remain damnable. They are damned by such a stubbornness and perversion of their desires, such a turning away from God, that their greatest delight is in having something which makes them suffer. They are always looking for a reason to become angry. ”

“ And if the dominant principle in the existence of the physical world is the decree to give it the greatest possible perfection, the primary purpose in the moral world or in the city of God which constitutes the noblest part of the universe ought to be to extend the greatest happiness possible. We must not therefore doubt that God has so ordained everything that spirits not only shall live forever, because this is unavoidable, but that they shall also preserve forever their moral quality, so that his city may never lose a person, quite in the same way that the world never loses a substance. ”

“ I have concluded that if the animal does not begin to be in the order of nature, it also does not cease to be in the order of nature, and that not only there is no generation, but no entire destruction—no death, strictly considered. ”