Why, though, can only one of these possible universes exist? Why can’t God create them all, or create one universe which includes all possibles? To this, Leibniz’s answer is: because not all possibles are compossible, that is, not all possibles are able to exist in the same universe. As far as one can tell, Leibniz did not advance a reason for this view; in one text from 1680 he even states that it is ‘unknown to men’ why certain things are incompossible.177 Despite that, Leibniz consistently maintained that ‘there are many possible universes, each collection of compossibles making up one of
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