Note 25 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious thought.25 His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée,26 written in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers27 a process of begging the question. Deity, a mere “infinition” of finite qualities, is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other men’s theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed truths;28 and he always discussed the Bible as a believer; yet he rarely went to church;29 and the Low German nickname Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, “believes nothing”) expressed his local reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one else went, save his secretary.30 It is on the whole difficult to doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had been and has been for deism and atheism.31 He and Newton were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age; and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of Newton32 tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism.33 Spinoza being, according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,34 there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of optimism—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds—which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful men give up the principle.