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With God, it is plain that his understanding contains the ideas of all possible things, and that is how everything is in him in a transcendent manner. These ideas represent to him the good and evil, the perfection and imperfection, the order and disorder, the congruity and incongruity of possibles; and his superabundant goodness makes him choose the most advantageous.
The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract sense. But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically?
But as all the possibles are not compatible together in one and the same world-sequence, for that very reason all the possibles cannot be produced, and it must be said that God is not forced, metaphysically speaking, into the creation of this world.
I shall never, as long as I live, forget his assurances upon that head, the tone and air with which he said it, and the cordiality of it. Il a indubitablement le meilleur des coeurs possibles.
His natural sequence of ideas impelled him to try a square, in the hope that the circumscribed and inscribed circles might give him a similar "analogy" for the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. He next tried a pentagon and so on, but he soon noted that he would never reach the sun that way, nor would he find any such limitation as six, the number of "possibles" being obviously infinite.
But as matter is itself of God's creation, it only furnishes a comparison and an example, and cannot be the very source of evil and of imperfection. I have already shown that this source lies in the forms or ideas of the possibles, for it must be eternal, and matter is not so.
Now the power or faculty is between the substance, which is the powerful, and the generation and the thing generated, which are both possibles. There being then these three things, the power, the powerful, and the possible; before the power can exist, the powerful must of necessity be presupposed as its subject, and the power must also necessarily subsist before the possible.
My own opinion is founded on the nature of the possibles, that is, of things that imply no contradiction. I do not think that a Spinozist will say that all the romances one can imagine exist actually now, or have existed, or will still exist in some place in the universe. Yet one cannot deny that romances such as those of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, or as Octavia, are possible.
But this, as Chrysippus says, fell out casually. For if the possession of place is the cause of incorruptibility, and this was the production of chance, it is manifest that the preservation of the universe is a work of chance, and not of Fate and Providence. Now, as for his doctrine of possibles, how can it but be repugnant to his doctrine of Fate?
In America it has always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps with the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had, along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and statesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to the abolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentiment against the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order.
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