In a very different mood the great Leibnitz, in his famous theory of optimism, argued that a perfect world is in the nature of things impossible, but that the world in which we live is the best of possible worlds. The limitation of the Creator's power is made somewhat more explicitly by Plato, who regarded the world as the imperfect realization of a Divine Idea that in itself is perfect. It is owing to the intractableness and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea finds itself so imperfectly realized. Thus the Creator's power is limited by the nature of the material out of which he makes the world. In other words, the world in which we live is the best the Creator could make out of the wretched material at his disposal. This Platonic view is closely akin to that of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise as to lend itself more readily to myth-making. Matter is not only considered as what Dr. Martineau would call a "datum objective to God," but it is endowed with a diabolical character of its own. [Illustration] III _Manichæism and Calvinism_ It is but a step from this to the complicated personifications of Gnosticism, with its Demiurgus, or inferior spirit that created the world. By some of the Gnostics the Creator was held to be merely an inferior emanation from God, a notion which had a powerful indirect effect upon the shaping of Christian doctrine in the second and third centuries of our era. A similar thought appears in the mournful question asked by Tennyson's Arthur:-- "O me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world And had not force to shape it as he would?"