346 ON THE ULTIMATE 



But, you will say, we find that the opposite of this 

 takes place in the world, for veiy often the best people 

 suffer the worst things, and those who are innocent, both 

 animals and men, are afflicted and put to death even 

 with torture ; and indeed the world, especially if we 

 consider the government of the human race, seems rather 

 a confused chaos than anything directed by a supreme 

 wisdom. So, I confess, it seems at a first glance, but 

 when we look at it more closely the opposite conclusion 

 manifestly follows a priori from those very considerations 

 which have been adduced, the conclusion, namely, that 

 the highest possible perfection of all things, and therefore 

 of all minds, is brought about. 



And indeed, as the lawyers say, it is not proper to 

 judge unless we have examined the whole law. We 

 know a very small part of eternity which is immeasure- 

 able in its extent ; for what a little thing is the record 

 of a few thousand years, which history transmits to us ! 

 Nevertheless, from so slight an experience we rashly 

 judge regarding the immeasureable and eternal, like men 

 who, having been born and brought up in prison or, 

 perhaps, in the subterranean salt-mines of the Sarma- 

 tians 32 , should think that there is no oth^r light in the 



" The reference is probably to some of the salt-mines in or near 

 the Carpathians, which are the richest in Europe. The most 

 famous salt-mines in the world are at Wielicza, near Cracow in 

 Galicia (which in Leibniz's time was still part of the kingdom of 

 Poland). They have been worked for about 600 years, and many 

 of the workers live permanently underground, there being streets 

 and houses and, in short, something like a village in the lower 

 levels. In Jeremy Collier's Dictionary, published towards the end 

 of the seventeenth century, the famous salt-mines are said to be 

 those of Eperies, in northern Hungary, on the other side of the 

 Carpathians from Cracow. Sarmatia is a very vague word. Ac- 

 cording to Ptolemy it included all the eastern European plain from 

 the Vistula and the Dniester to the Volga. In any case it included 

 the district of the salt-mines referred to. Leibniz elsewhere seems 

 to identify Sarmatian with Slavonic speech. (Nouveaux Essais, iii. 

 2, i ; E. 299 b ; G. v. 259, 260.) In English verse, Sarmatia is 

 often used as synonymous with Poland, e. g. ' Sarmatia fell, un- 

 wept, without a crime ' (Campbell, Pkasures of Hope, Part i. line 376 ; 

 see also 1. 407). 



