A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 201 



piricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of arti- 

 ficiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on 

 metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and 

 practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet and following the 

 call of the wild. 



Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with 

 which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz 

 was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than 

 most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality 

 incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written Theodicee 

 of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to 

 prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me 

 quote a specimen of what I mean. 



Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to 

 Leibnitz to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is 

 infinitely greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he as- 

 sumes as a premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue 

 in this way. Even then, he says : 



The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we 

 once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus Curio 

 has written a little hook, ' De Amplitudine Eegni Coelestis,' which was reprinted 

 not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. 

 The ancients had small ideas of the works of God. ... It seemed to them that 

 only our Earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave them 

 pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a 

 few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant 

 or refuse to the Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, 

 as big as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support 

 rational inhabitants, though it does not follow that they need all be men. Our 

 earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the fixed 

 stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our earth takes 

 up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns may be 

 inhabited by none but happy creatures; and nothing obliges us to believe that 

 the number of damned persons is very great; for a very feiv instances and samples 

 ivould suffice for the utility which good draios from evil. Moreover, since there 

 is no reason to suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great 

 space beyond the region of the stars? And this immense space, surrounding all 

 this region, . . . may be replete with happiness and glory. . . . What now be- 

 comes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it not 

 dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since our earth is 

 but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of the 

 universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with that 

 which is unknown to us, and yet which we are obliged to admit; and all the 

 evils that we know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be 

 almost-nothing in comparison with the goods that the Universe contains. 



Leibnitz continues elsewhere : 



There is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the 

 criminal, nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the 



