Indeed the moral interpretation of the universe is strangely apt to meet with aversion instead of satisfaction. Experience of mankind shows a mysterious tendency to decline from man's true ideal, which possesses human beings from the very beginning of their personal life which shows itself as a tendency that ought continually to be resisted, and against which the policy of mankind ought to be a constant struggle-sustained in each individual person, in the form of religious endeavour to live the divine life, and thus recover the ideal man in his individual instance. For moral evil is found in more than a few persons. Leibniz seeks to explain them in the celebrated optimist theory unfolded in his ‘Théodicée.’ But Tarquin and Nero and Caligula are not singular, among monsters who have appeared in human form, and occupied thrones as well as all places from thrones downwards, in the history of mankind to the present hour-the source of told and untold misery to myriads of living beings. The appearance of Sextus Tarquin, that monster of cruelty, is taken by Leibniz as an example of the lurid facts which threaten to paralyse theistic faith, casting doubt on the moral meaning of the universe. It is an actual fact, found in the lives of human persons who occupy this planet.
The existence of what ought not to exist, in human beings.
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