The Meditation, together with the Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf, is the most important large-scale writing about justice which Leibniz produced. Though it is unfinished, and though the argument somehow never becomes quite as strong as it threatens to do from time to time, it still contains a good statement of his conviction that principles of right must be of the same kind as the ‘eternal truths’ of mathematics and logic, that there is a continuum between abstaining from evil and doing good, that divine justice must be of the same kind as human justice (differing only in the degree of its perfection), that communal property is desirable but unattainable etc. There are, in addition, passages commenting on Aristotle, Filmer, Hobbes, and others, which are of some interest; and the rejection of arguments in defense of slavery was liberal for its day. The Meditation must have been written, to judge from internal evidence, in c. 1703. (The original text is to be found in Mollat's Rechtsphilosophisches aus Leibnizens ungedruckten Schriften; this version omits the word ‘I’ [je] which comes at the end of the ms. in the Hanover library, and which would have led into a longer conclusion which, for some reason, Leibniz did not write.)