ORIGINATION OF THINGS 341 



receptivity or capacity of the world 15 may here be con- 

 sidered as the outlay or ground on which the world is 

 to be built as fittingly [guam commodissime] as possible, 

 while the variety of forms corresponds to the fitness 

 [commoditas] of the building and to the number and 

 elegance of its rooms. The whole matter may be likened 

 to certain games in which all the spaces on a board are 

 to be filled up according to definite rules, so that, unless 

 you make use of some ingenious contrivance, you find 

 yourself in the end kept out of some refractory spaces 

 and compelled to leave empty more spaces than you 

 intended and some which you might otherwise have 

 filled. Yet there is a definite method by which the 

 most complete filling up of the spaces may most easily 

 be accomplished. So if we have to draw a triangle, no 

 other determining condition being given, it will be an 

 equilateral triangle ; and if a line is to be drawn from 

 one point to another, no further condition being assigned, 

 the easiest or shortest way will be chosen. So if once 

 it is given that being is superior to not-being (that is to 

 say, that there is a reason why something should exist 

 rather than nothing 16 ), or that possibility must pass into 

 actuality, it follows that, though nothing further is 

 determined, there must exist as much as is possible con- 

 sidering the capacity of time and space (that is, of the 

 possible order of existing 17 ), just as tiles are put together 



contains the greatest balance of perfection over limitation or of 

 good over evil, i. e. the maximum of advantage at the minimum 

 of cost. In this sense the 'principle of the best,' to which Leibniz 

 constantly refers, is a 'principle of determination according to 

 maximum and minimum.' That the cost should be minimum 

 might be taken as a way of stating the ' law of parsimony.' 



15 That is, the natural or essential limits within which the 

 actual world may express an ideal possibility, which has no limits. 

 This limiting 'receptivity or capacity' (which is to the world what 

 the body is to the individual Monad) might be regarded as the 

 passivity or matter of the world, in contrast with its activity or 

 form. 



16 Cf. Principles of Nature and of Grace, 7. 



17 i. e. not merely the order which we discover among actual 

 things, but the order which is a condition of possible things 



