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It was necessary to take the roundabout way through occasionalism and the preëstablished harmony, including the latter's retreat to the omnipotence of God, before it was possible to miss the question of the validity of the presupposition that the connection between cause and effect is analytic and rational.

What was his famous Principle of the Sufficient Reason, the very corner stone of his philosophy, from which the Preestablished Harmony, the doctrine of Monads, and all the opinions most characteristic of Leibnitz, were corollaries?

His polemic, which is inspired throughout with the spirit of Locke, is directed against the innate ideas of the Cartesians, Malebranche’s faculty—psychology, Leibnitz’s monadism and preestablished harmony, and, above all, against the conception of substance set forth in the first part of the Ethics of Spinoza.

After all, he has felt constrained to have recourse to the hypothesis of a preëstablished harmony in order to restore, if possible, the liberty which his scheme of necessity had banished from the universe.

Thus arose his celebrated, but now obsolete fiction, of a preëstablished harmony.