4. NATURAL THEOLOGY.—Wolff uses here the cosmological argument to demonstrate the existence of a God. God might have made different worlds, but has preferred the present one as the best. This world has been called into being by the will of God. His aim in its creation was the manifestation of his own perfection. Evil in the world does not spring from the Divine will, but from the limited being of human things. God permits it only as a means of good.
This brief aphoristic exposition of Wolff’s metaphysics, shows how greatly it is related to the doctrine of Leibnitz. The latter, however, loses much of its speculative profoundness by the abstract and logical treatment it receives in the hands of Wolff. For the most part, the specific elements of the monadology remain in the background; with Wolff, his simple beings are not representative like the Monads, but more like the Atoms. Hence there is with him much that is illogical and contradictory. His peculiar merit in metaphysics is ontology, which he has elaborated far more strictly than his predecessors. A multitude of philosophical terminations owe to him their origin, and their introduction into philosophical language.
The philosophy of Wolff, comprehensible and distinct as it was, and by its composition in the German language more accessible than that of Leibnitz, soon became the popular philosophy, and gained an extensive influence. Among the names which deserve credit for their scientific treatment of it, we may mention _Thümming_, 1697-1728; _Bilfinger_, 1693-1750; _Baumeister_, 1708-1785; _Baumgarten_ the esthetic, 1714-1762; and his scholar _Meier_, 1718-1777.