I cannot refrain from expressing to Your Highness my sorrow at his attachment to those opinions, which he has indeed felt could hardly be permitted in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church would prohibit his entertaining them, and it is apparently this attachment that has prevented his entering the fold, notwithstanding the fact that Your Highness, if I remember rightly, brought him to recognize that there was no reasonable doubt as to its being the true church. *002 Would it not be better for him to leave those metaphysical speculations which can be of utility neither to himself nor to others, in order to apply himself seriously to the most important matter he can ever undertake, namely, to assure his salvation, by entering into the Church from which new sects can form only by rendering themselves schismatic? I read yesterday by chance one of Saint Augustine's letters in which he answers various questions that were put forward by a Pagan who showed a desire to become a Christian but who always postponed doing so. He says, at the end, what may be applied to our friend "There are numberless problems which are not to be solved before one has faith and will not be solved in life without faith."

III: Leibniz to Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels

April 12, 1686.

I do not know what to say to M. A.'s letter, and I never should have thought that a person whose reputation is so great and so real and from whom we have such excellent Reflections on Morals and Logic would be so precipitate in his judgments. After this instance I am not surprised that some are angry at him. Nevertheless I think it well to be patient at times under the ill humor of one whose merit is extraordinary, provided his acts have no serious results and I believe that a judicious reply may dissipate a prejudice ill-founded. I anticipate this justice in M. A.

Whatever reason, however, I may have for complaint, I desire to suppress all reflections which are not essential to the matter in hand and which might serve to increase the ill-feeling, but I hope he will use the same moderation, in case he has the graciousness to act as my instructor. I am only able to assure him that he is quite mistaken in certain of his conjectures, because people of good sense have judged otherwise regarding my positions, and that notwithstanding their encouragement I have not been over quick in publishing anything upon abstract subjects which are to the taste of few people, inasmuch as the public even has as yet heard almost nothing in regard to certain more plausible discoveries which I made several years ago.

I have written down these Meditations only in order to profit for my own sake by the criticisms of more able thinkers and in order to receive confidence or correction in the investigation of these most important truths. It is true that some persons of intelligence have found my opinions acceptable, but I should be the first to warn them if I thought there were the slightest evil effects from them.

This declaration is sincere, and this will not be the first time that I have profited by the instruction of enlightened persons. This is why I shall assuredly be under great obligations to M. A. in case I merit his having the goodness to deliver me from the errors which he thinks dangerous and of which, I declare it in good faith, I am unable to see the evil. But I hope that he will use moderation, and that he will do me justice, because men deserve at least that no wrong be done to them through precipitate judgments.

He chooses one of my theses to show that it is dangerous. But either I am incapable for the present of understanding the difficulty or else there is none in it. This has enabled me to recover from my surprise and has made me think that M. Arnaud's remarks are the result of misconceptions. I will try therefore to deflect him from that strange opinion, which he conceived a little too hurriedly.

I said in the 13th article of my summary that the individual concept of each person involved once for all, all that would ever happen to him. From that he draws this conclusion that all that happens to any person and even to the whole human race must occur by a necessity more than fatal, as though concepts and previsions rendered things necessary and as though a free act could not be included in the concept or perfect view which God has of the person who performs it. And he adds that perhaps I will not find difficulties in the conclusion which he draws. Yet I have expressly protested in that same article that I do not admit such a conclusion. It must be then either that he doubts my sincerity for which I have given him no grounds or else he has not sufficiently examined that which he controverts. I do not complain as much as it appears I have a right to, because I remember that he was writing at a time when an indisposition did not permit him the liberty of his whole mind, as the letter itself witnesses. And I desire to have him know how much regard I have for him.

He says: "If this is true (that is to say that the individual concept of each person involves once for all all that will ever happen to him), God has not been free to create everything that has since happened to the human race, and all that will happen to it for all eternity must occur through a necessity more than fatalistic." (There is some fault in the copy but I have felt able to amend it as above.) "For the individual concept, Adam, has involved that he should have so many children and the individual concept of each one of these children has involved everything that they would do and all the children that they would have, and so on. There is therefore no more liberty in God regarding all that, supposing that he wished to create Adam, than there is to create a nature incapable of thought, supposing that he wished to create me."

To these last words ought properly to have been added the proof of the consequence but it is quite evident that they confuse