ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ S PHILOSOPHY 175 



reason intelligible to us. God would choose the best 

 possible world ; but it would be the best possible for no 

 other reason than that He chose it. Thus the totality of 

 possible ideal worlds has the appearance of being a system, 

 while really it is not. It is this ambiguity that conceals 

 the fundamental inconsistency of Leibniz the incon- 

 sistency of regarding God as both within the system of 

 things and quite outside of it (as the Creator), making 

 Him at once the source of the whole system of mutually 

 exclusive Monads and the highest Monad of the series, 

 without whom the system would itself be incomplete. 

 The principle of sufficient reason, rightly understood, in- 

 volves the supposition of one all-embracing system ; but 

 though Leibniz had certainly an inkling of the truth 

 of this, his individualistic tendency and his dread of 

 Spinozism prevented him from fully realizing it. 



For Kant there is but one system of experience, that 

 which actually exists. The supposition of a choice among 

 possible worlds is no part of his philosophy. But in 

 Kant's doctrine the t thing-in-itself ' performs very much 

 the same function as did the ' choice ' in Leibniz's scheme 

 of things. Each is a way of allowing for a possible reality 

 other than the actual system, although the need of this 

 arises from one cause in Leibniz, and from another in 

 Kant. Leibniz wishes to avoid a doctrine of blind neces- 

 sity : Kant is afraid of a pure relativity. They both feel 

 that the ultimate ground of the system of mutually related 

 things must be sought in some principle outside the 

 system itself l . The dogmatism of Leibniz appears in his 



1 Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, Eosenkranz, ii. 524 ; Hartensteiii, 

 ii. 513 (Meiklejohn's Tr., p. 414) : 'The notions of reality, of sub- 

 stance, of causality, of necessary existence itself, have no signifi- 

 cance in determining any object, beyond their use in making 

 possible the empirical cognition of a thing. They may thus be 

 used to explain the possibility of things in the world of sense, but 

 they cannot be used to explain the possibility of the unicerse itself; 

 since in this case the ground of explanation must lie outside the 

 world, and can therefore be no object of a possible experience. 

 Now, relatively to the world of sense, I may admit such an incom- 

 prehensible being, the object of a mere idea ; though I may not 



