Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with
which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind.
Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in
facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for
superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly
written 'Theodicee' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways
of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of
possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean.

Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to
Leibnitz to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is
infinitely greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he
assumes as a premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to
argue in this way. Even then, he says:

"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good,
if we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius
Secundus Curio has written a little book, 'De Amplitudine Regni
Coelestis,' which was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to
compass the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had
small ideas of the works of God. ... It seemed to them that only our
earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave
them pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining
globes and a few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever be the
limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe we must recognize
in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or bigger, which
have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants,
tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth is only
one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the fixed
stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our