DESCARTES TO BERKELEY providence of God God has so ordered things that spirits, the most precious items in the universe, live for ever in full self-consciousness; and for those that love him he has prepared unimaginable felicity It will be seen from this brief summary that the Discourse embeds itself in Aristotelian metaphysics and traditional Christianity, and that it includes elements from recent continental philosophers carefully modiWed to cohere with each other Its main ideas were published in a learned journal in 1695 under the title New System of Nature and of the Interaction of Substances Many savants published criticisms of it, to which Leibniz responded with vigorous rebuttals In 1698 he followed up with another journal article, ‘On Nature itself ’, which clearly marked out his own system in contrast to those of Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza, on which he had drawn for his synthesis Having failed to bring together Catholics and Protestants (in spite of his Systema Theologicum of 1686, which set out common ground between the various confessions), Leibniz set himself the potentially easier task of achieving a reconciliation between Calvinist Protestants and Lutheran Protestants This again proved beyond his powers of argument and persuasion So too was his grandiose project of a European confederation of Christian states, in which he tried in vain to interest successively Louis XIV of France and Peter the Great of Russia But his passion for ecumenism was undiminished, and in the last year of his life he was encouraging those Jesuits who were seeking an accommodation between Catholic Christianity and the traditional beliefs and rituals of Chinese Confucians He remained a Protestant himself until his death, although he sometimes carried a rosary, which on one occasion prevented him being thrown overboard as a heretical Jonah during a storm on an Adriatic crossing Locke’s rejection of innate ideas in his Essay concerning Human Understanding provoked Leibniz into an all-out attack on empiricism This was completed by 1704 but in that year Locke died, and Leibniz decided not to publish It saw the light some Wfty years after his own death, under the title New Essays on Human Understanding The longest work published during Leibniz’s lifetime was Essays in Theodicy, a vindication of divine justice in the face of the evils of the world, dedicated to Queen Charlotte of Prussia ‘Theodicy’ is a pseudo-Greek word coined to express the project of justifying the works of God to man The book argues that in spite of appearances we indeed live in the best of all possible worlds Its message was summed up by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man: 73