free-will and fate,--individual liberty and a necessary world. This
antithesis disappears in the light of the Leibnitian philosophy,
which resolves freedom and necessity into different points of
view and different stages of development. The principle of the
Preestablished Harmony was designed by Leibnitz to meet the
difficulty, started by Des Cartes, of explaining the conformity between
the perceptions of the mind and the corresponding affections of the
body, since mind and matter, in his view, could have no connection
with, or influence on each other. The Cartesians explained this
correspondence by the theory of _occasional causes_, that is, by
the intervention of the Deity, who was supposed by his arbitrary will to
have decreed a certain perception or sensation in the mind to go
with a certain affection of the body, with which, however, it had no
real connection. "Car il" (that is, M. Bayle) "est persuade avec les
Cartesiens modernes, que les idees des qualites sensibles que Dieu
donne, selon eux, a l'ame, a l'occasion des mouvemens du corps,
n'ont rien qui represente ces mouvemens, ou qui leur ressemble; de
sorte qu'il etoit purement arbitraire que Dieu nous donnat les idees
de la chaleur, du froid, de la lumiere et autres que nous
experimentons, ou qu'il nous en donnat de tout-autres a cette meme
occasion." [30]

[Footnote 30: _Theodicee_. Partie II. 340.]

If the body was exposed to the flame, there was no more reason,
according to this theory, why the soul should be conscious of pain
than of pleasure, except that God had so ordained. Such a supposition
was shocking to our philosopher, who could tolerate no arbitrariness
in God and no gap or discrepancy in nature, and who, therefore,
sought to explain, by the nature of the soul itself and its kindred