Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/314

892 LEIBNITZ. Fechner, that the good is not the flower of a quiet, unmo* lested development, but the fruit of energetic labor ; that it has need of its opposite ; that it not merely must approve itself in the battle against evil without and within the acting subject, but that it is only through this conflict that it is attainable at all. Virtue implies force of will as well as purity, and force develops only by resistance. Although he does not appreciate the full depth of the significance of pain, Leibnitz's view of suffering deserves more approval than his questionable application to the ethical sphere of the quantitative view of the world, with its interpretation of evil as merely undeveloped good. But, in any case, the com- passionate contempt of the pessimism of the day for the "shallow" Leibnitz is most unjustifiable.