The best possible world is a world of free agents, whose acts are rewarded or punished according to their deserts. If we discover what seems to be inexplicable evil, we must regard it as an incident in the harmony of the whole. The world would be less good without evil. There is no more evil than there ought to be. The world which God conceived to be the best possible――this world――is a world of lights and shades. Evil comes from the free agency of man, and God is not responsible for it. It is better to have evil and free agency than no evil and no free agency. Evil after all is not positive, and is only due to the indistinct ideas of man. It is the absence of good, as cold is the absence of heat. Thus a preëstablished harmony was constructed by Leibnitz that does not come out of his original philosophical premises. Leibnitz used his celebrated figure of the two clocks to illustrate the harmony of the monads. Two clocks keep the same time, not because they influence one another (interaction), nor because the maker moves the hands of one (Occasionalism), but because they have been thus constructed by an intelligent Creator. Thus the harmony of the world implies a personal God. Leibnitz’s philosophical Rationalism here passed into theology, and his metaphysics became an ethics. Leibnitz began with a monadology, and by means of the conception of harmony passed to an optimism. CHAPTER VI THE ENLIGHTENMENT (1690–1781)[36] =The Emergence of the “New Man,”――Individualism.= In passing to this period we should recall the two objects of interest that distinguish modern from mediæval thought: the “new man” of modern Europe; and the “new universe”――new in its geographical outlines and in its intellectual materials. We have already found that the two hundred and more years of the Renaissance, the first period of modern thought, was absorbed in exploiting the second of these objects――the “new universe.” In fact the “new man” had been so interested in the “new universe” that he had not thought of studying himself. He had systematized the great wealth of his acquisitions and had constructed great systems of science and metaphysics.