If Your Serene Highness were not a Prince whose intelligence is as great as is his moderation, I should have been on my guard in speaking of these things. To whom, however, do they relate better than to you, and since you have had the goodness to act as intermediary in this discussion, can we without imprudence have recourse to any other arbitrator? In so far as the concern is not so much regarding the truth of certain propositions as regarding their consequences and their being tolerated, I do not believe that you will approve so much vehemence over so small a matter. It is quite possible, however, that M. A. spoke in those severe terms only because he believed that I would admit the consequence which he had reason to find so terrifying and that he will change his language after my explanation. To this, his own sense of justice will contribute as much as the authority of Your Highness.

I am, with devotion, etc.

IV: Leibniz to Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels

April 12, 1686.

I have received M. Arnaud's verdict and I think it well to disabuse his mind by the enclosed reply in the form of a letter to Your Highness. But I confess that I have had much difficulty in suppressing a desire as much to laugh as to express pity, inasmuch as the good man seems really to have lost a part of his mind and seems not to have been able to keep from crying out against everything as do those seized with melancholy to whom everything which they see or think of appears black. I have shown a good deal of moderation toward him but I have not avoided letting him quietly know that he is wrong. If he has the kindness to rescue me from the errors which he attributes to me and which he thinks to have seen in my writings, I wish that he would suppress the personal reflections and the severe expressions, which I have feigned not to notice out of the respect which I have for Your Serene Highness and also because of the respect which I have for the merits of the good man.

Yet I am surprised at the difference which there is between our pretended Santons and those persons of the world who pretend to no such position and have much more the effect. Your Serene Highness is a Sovereign Prince and still you have shown to me a moderation which I wonder at, while M. Arnaud is a famous theologian whose meditations on religious subjects ought to have rendered him mild and charitable, yet what he says seems often haughty, rough and full of severity. I am not surprised now that he has so easily fallen out with Father Malebranche and others who used to be his fast friends. Father Malebranche has published writings which M. Arnaud treated extravagantly almost as he has done in my case. The world has not always been of his opinions. He must take care, however, not to excite his bilious temper. It will deprive us of all the pleasure and all the satisfaction which I had anticipated in a mild and reasonable debate.

I believe he received my paper when he was in an ill humor and finding himself put to trouble by it, he wanted to revenge himself by a rebuff. I know that if Your Serene Highness had the leisure to consider the objection which he brought forward, you could not refrain from laughing at seeing the slight cause he had for making such tragic exclamations; quite as one would laugh on hearing an orator who should say every few minutes, "O coelum, O terra, O maria Neptuni."

I am glad that there is nothing more repellent, or more difficult in my thoughts than what he objects to. For according to him if what I say is true (namely that the individual concept or consideration of Adam, involves all that will happen to him and to his posterity), it follows that God will have no liberty any longer with respect to the human race. He imagines therefore that God is like a human being who forms his resolves in accordance with circumstances, while on the contrary, God, foreseeing and having regulated all things from all eternity, has chosen from the first the entire sequence and inter-relation of the universe and consequently not simply an Adam but such an Adam in regard to whom he foresaw that he would do such and such things and would have such and such children, without, however, this prevision of God's, though ordained from all time, interfering at all with his freedom. On this point all theologians, excepting some Socinians who think of God as a human being, are agreed. And I am surprised that the desire to find something repellent in my thoughts, prejudice against which had engendered in his mind a confused and ill-directed idea, has led this learned man to speak against his own knowledge and convictions. For I am not so unfair as to imitate him and to impute to him the dangerous doctrine of those Socinians which destroys the sovereign perfection of God, although he seems almost to incline to that doctrine in the heat of debate.

Every man who acts wisely considers all the circumstances and bearings of the resolve which he makes, and this in accordance with the measure of his abilities. And God, who sees every thing perfectly and with a single glance, can he have failed to make his plans in conformity with everything which he saw? And can he have chosen a particular Adam without considering and having in mind all that has relations to him? Consequently it is ridiculous to say that this free resolve on God's part deprives him of his liberty. Otherwise in order to be free one must need be ever undecided. Such are the thoughts which are repellent to Mr. Arnaud. We will see if through their consequences he will be able to derive something worse from them. Yet the most important reflection which I have made in the enclosed is that he himself some time ago expressly wrote to Your Serene Highness that no trouble was given to a man who was in their church or who wished to be in it, for his philosophical opinions and here is he now, forgetting this moderation, and losing control of himself over a trifle. It is therefore dangerous to consort with such people and Your Serene Highness sees how many precautions one should take. This was one of the very reasons why I communicated the summary to M. Arnaud, viz., to probe a little and to see what his behaviour would be. But tange montes et fumigabunt. As soon as one swings away the least amount from the positions of certain professors they burst forth into explosions and thunders.