  In his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) Pierre Bayle began the modern philosophical discussion of the problem of evil by quoting Xenophanes’ remark (as reported in Diogenes Laertius 9.19) that “most things give way to mind” (ta polla hêssô nou). Accepting the conjecture proposed by the classical scholar Méric Casaubon, Bayle took Xenophanes to be asserting that God was unable to make all things conform to his benevolent will. Bayle then assembled a set of texts in support of the view that in fact the amount of evil in the universe far exceeds the amount of good. Bayle’s article sparked a reply from Leibniz (in his Théodicée of 1710). In his Candide (1759), Voltaire supported Bayle’s view by ridiculing Leibniz’s contention that this is the best of all possible worlds.  Although there may be no direct line of influence, we may also consider Feuerbach’s critique of religious belief as a ‘projection’ of human attributes, and Freud’s analysis of religious belief as an instance of ‘wish-fulfillment’, as two modern successors to Xenophanes’ observation of the general tendency of human beings to conceive of divine beings in terms of their own attributes and capacities.