Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally.

This is a reprint of slightly enlarged facsimiles of the original journal pages from Histoire critique de la République des lettres, 11 (1716), Title Page + 115-33. (For ease of reference, the pagination of pp. 115-33 coincides perfectly with the Review pagination.) This article by John Toland has never been reprinted. The editor gratefully acknowledges the permission of The British Library to print the pages, and the kind assistance of R.S. Woolhouse in obtaining the original copies.

This piece appeared as article 5 in the Histoire critique de la République des lettres for 1716. Published anonymously, its traditional attributionto John Toland may now be taken as established.1 It was transmitted to the Histoire by Pierre Desmaizeaux who also sent the piece which it criticises, ‘Réponse de M. Leibniz aux reflexions ... de M. Bayle’. This was written in 1702 but not published until 1716 when it appeared as article 4 in the same volume of the Histoire. Leibniz’s response to Toland is in a letter of the same year to Samuel Masson, the editor of the Histoire. ‘Remarques critiques’ has never been reprinted, and a facsimile copy of the journal pages follows our translation in this issue of The Leibniz Review. This is the first published English translation, as translated by Richard Francks and R.S. Woolhouse.

One argument that Leibniz employed to rule out the possibility of a world soul appears to turn on the assumption that the very notion of an infinite number or of an infinite whole is inconsistent. This argument was considered in a series of three papers published in The Leibniz Review: in the first, by Laurence Carlin, the argument was delineated and analyzed; in the second, by myself, the argument was criticized and rejected; in the third, by Richard Arthur, an attempt was made to defend Leibniz’s argument against my criticisms. In the present paper, I take up the matter again in an attempt to clarify the issues involved and to defend my original criticisms of the argument against the objections raised by Arthur.