settlement of the actual evidence of consciousness with regard to a subject which, in all ages, has tended to excite speculation, and which, since the time of Berkeley, has been regarded by acute minds as, at least, an "open question" in metaphysical science.
The most important service, however, which its author hoped to render by his System of Monads, relates to the refutation of Pantheism. The Monadologie, with the consequent doctrines, is essentially an effort to indicate the metaphysical and moral relations of the Divine Being with the universe. Antagonist to the Cartesian hypothesis of occasional causes, the doctrine of a pre-established harmony has been accused of tending to an atheistic separation of the world from God, while the rival system has been counted open to the charge of an identification of the creature and the Creator, of which there are signs in the system of Malebranche, and which was fully developed in the Ethics of Spinoza. We are unable to undertake an elaborate discussion of a subject so profound and complicated as the one suggested by these speculations—a discussion which requires a previous settlement of the limits and canons of metaphysical reasoning—and we would conclude this Essay with some allusion to that awful frontier land, where religion becomes blended with the higher philosophy, and where objects have been found fitted to attract educated and uneducated minds in all ages of the world.
Leibnitz, as we have seen, was led by his love of speculation, and also by a desire to repel the sceptical
