’I will also omit all objections which are not more contrary to his opinion than to that of some other philosophers.  I will not therefore propose the difficulties that may be raised against the supposition that a creature can receive from God the power of moving itself.  They are strong and almost unanswerable, but M. Leibniz’s system does not lie more open to them than that of the Aristotelians; nay, I do not know whether the Cartesians would presume to say that God cannot communicate to our souls a power of acting.  If they say so, how can they own that Adam sinned?  And if they dare not[39] say so they weaken the arguments whereby they endeavour to prove that matter is not capable of any activity.  Nor do I believe that it is more difficult for M. Leibniz than for the Cartesians or other philosophers, to free himself from the objection of a fatal mechanism which destroys human liberty.  Wherefore, waiving this, I shall only speak of what is peculiar to the system of the pre-established harmony.

’I.  My first observation shall be, that it raises the power and wisdom of the divine art above everything that can be conceived.  Fancy to yourself a ship which, without having any sense or knowledge, and without being directed by any created or uncreated being, has the power of moving itself so seasonably as to have always the wind favourable, to avoid currents and rocks, to cast anchor where it ought to be done, and to retire into a harbour precisely when it is necessary.  Suppose such a ship sails in that manner for several years successively, being always turned and situated as it ought to be, according to the several changes of the air and the different situations of seas and lands; you will acknowledge that God, notwithstanding his infinite power, cannot communicate such a faculty to a ship; or rather you will say that the nature of a ship is not capable of receiving it from God.  And yet what M. Leibniz supposes about the machine of a human body is more admirable and more surprising than all this.  Let us apply his system concerning the union of the soul with the body to the person of Julius Caesar.

’II.  We must say according to this system that the body of Julius Caesar did so exercise its moving faculty that from its birth to its death it went through continual changes which did most exactly answer the perpetual changes of a certain soul which it did not know and which made no impression on it.  We must say that the rule according to which that faculty of Caesar’s body performed such actions was such, that he would have gone to the Senate upon such a day and at such an hour, that he would have spoken there such and such words, etc., though God had willed to annihilate his soul the next day after it was created.  We must say that this moving power did change and modify itself exactly according to the volubility of the thoughts of that ambitious man, and that it was affected precisely in a certain manner rather than in another, because the soul of Caesar passed from a certain thought to another.  Can a blind power modify itself so exactly by virtue of an impression communicated thirty or forty years [40] before and never renewed since, but left to itself, without ever knowing what it is to do?  Is not this much more incomprehensible than the navigation I spoke of in the foregoing paragraph?