One criticism of Leibniz’s argument we cannot refrain from making.  He allows himself too easy a triumph when he says that the only alternative to a choice determined by a prevailing inclination towards one proposal is a choice of mere caprice.  There is a sort of choice Leibniz never so much as considers and which appears at least to fall quite outside his categories, and that is the sort of choice exercised in artistic creativity.  In such choice we freely feel after the shaping of a scheme, we do not arbitrate simply between shaped and given possible schemes.  And perhaps some such element enters into all our choices, since our life is to some extent [33] freely designed by ourselves.  If so, our minds are even more akin to the divine mind than Leibniz realized.  For the sort of choice we are now referring to seems to be an intuitive turning away from an infinite, or at least indefinite, range of less attractive possibility.  And such is the nature of the divine creative choice.  The consequence of such a line of speculation would be, that the divine mind designs more through us, and less simply for us, than Leibniz allowed:  the ‘harmony’ into which we enter would be no longer simply ‘pre-established’.  Leibniz, in fact, could have nothing to do with such a suggestion, and he would have found it easy to be ironical about it if his contemporaries had proposed it.

II

Leibniz wrote two books; a considerable number of articles in learned periodicals; and an enormous number of unpublished notes, papers and letters, preserved in the archives of the Electors of Hanover not because of the philosophical significance of some of them, but because of the political importance of most of them.  From among this great mass various excerpts of philosophical interest have been made by successive editors of Leibniz’s works.  It may be that the most profound understanding of his mind is to be derived from some of these pieces, but if we wish to consider the public history of Leibniz, we may set them aside.

Of the two books, one was published, and the other never was.  The New Essays remained in Leibniz’s desk, the Theodicy saw the light.  And so, to his own and the succeeding generation, Leibniz was known as the author of the Theodicy.

The articles in journals form the immediate background to the two books.  In 1696 Leibniz heard that a French translation of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding was being prepared at Amsterdam.  He wrote some polite comments on Locke’s great work, and published them.  He also sent them to Locke, hoping that Locke would write a reply, and that Leibniz’s reflexions and Locke’s reply might be appended to the projected French translation.  But Locke set Leibniz’s comments aside.  Leibniz, not to be defeated, set to work upon the New Essays, in which the whole substance of Locke’s book is systematically discussed in dialogue.  The New Essays were written in 1703.  But meanwhile a painful dispute had broken out between Leibniz [34] and the disciples of Locke and Newton, in which the English, and perhaps Newton himself, were much to blame, and Leibniz thought it impolitic to publish his book.  It was not issued until long after his death, in the middle of the century.