The idea of God is of such a nature, that the being corresponding to
it, if possible, must be actual. We have the idea; it involves no
bounds, no negation, consequently no contradiction. It is the idea
of a possible, therefore of an actual.

"God is the primitive Unity, or the simple original Substance of
which all the creatures, or original monads, are the products, and
_are generated, so to speak, by continual fulgurations from moment
to moment, bounded by the receptivity of the creature_, of whose
existence limitation is an essential condition." [26]

[Footnote 26: Ib. 47.]

The philosophic theologian and the Christianizing philosopher will
rejoice to find in this proposition a point of reconciliation between
the extramundane God of pure theism and the cardinal principle of
Spinozism, the immanence of Deity in creation,--a principle as dear
to the philosophic mind as that of the extramundane Divinity is to
the theologian. The universe of Spinoza is a self-existent unit,
divine in itself, but with no Divinity behind it. That of Leibnitz
is an endless series of units from a self-existent and divine source.
The one is an infinite deep, the other an everlasting flood.

The doctrine of the _Preestablished Harmony_, so intimately and
universally associated with the name of Leibnitz, has found little
favor with his critics, or even with his admirers. Feuerbach calls
it his weak side, and thinks that Leibnitz's philosophy, else so
profound, was here, as in other instances, overshadowed by the
popular creed; that he accommodated himself to theology, as a highly