“The ancients,” says he, “attributed the cause of evil to matter; but where shall we, who derive all things from God, find the source of evil?”(71) He has more than once answered this question, by saying that the source of evil is to be found in the ideas of the divine mind. “Chrysippus,” says he, “has reason to allege that vice comes from the original constitution of some spirits. It is objected to him that God has formed them; and he can only reply, that the imperfection of matter does not permit him to do better. This reply is good for nothing; for matter itself is indifferent to all forms, and besides God has made it. Evil comes rather from forms themselves, but abstract; that is to say, from ideas that God has not produced by an act of his will, no more than he has produced number and figures; and no more, in one word, than all those possible essences which we regard as eternal and necessary; for they find themselves in the ideal region of possibles; that is to say, in the divine understanding. God is then not the author of those essences, in so far as they are only possibilities; but there is nothing actual, but what he discerned and called into existence; and he has permitted evil, because it is enveloped in the best plan which is found in the region of possibles; that plan the supreme wisdom could not fail to choose. It is this notion which at once satisfies the wisdom, the power, and the goodness of God, and yet leaves room for the entrance of evil.”(72) In reading the lofty speculations of Leibnitz, we have been often led to wonder how one, whose genius was so great, could have permitted himself to rest in conceptions which appear so vague and indistinct. In the above passage we have both light and obscurity; and we find it difficult to determine which predominates over the other. We are clearly told that God is not the author of evil, because this proceeds from abstract forms which were from all eternity enveloped in his understanding, and not from any operation of his will. But how does evil proceed from abstract forms; from the ideal region of the possible? Leibnitz does not mean that evil proceeds from abstract ideas, before they are embodied in the creation of real moral agents. Why then did God create beings which he knew from all eternity would commit sin? and why, having created them, did he contribute to their sins by a divine concourse? This is coming down from the _ideal_ region of the possible, into the world of _real_ difficulties.