Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition
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Title: Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition
Author: John Dewey
Release date: October 6, 2012 [eBook #40957]
Language: English
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GERMAN PHILOSOPHICAL CLASSICS
FOR
ENGLISH READERS AND STUDENTS.
EDITED BY
GEORGE S. MORRIS.
LEIBNIZ'S NEW ESSAYS CONCERNING
THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.
LEIBNIZ'S
NEW ESSAYS CONCERNING THE
HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.
A CRITICAL EXPOSITION.
By JOHN DEWEY, Ph.D.,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
MICHIGAN, AND PROFESSOR (ELECT) OF MENTAL AND
MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF MINNESOTA
CHICAGO:
SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY
1902
Copyright, 1888,
By S. C. Griggs and Company.
PREFACE.
The purpose of the series of which the present volume is one, is not,
as will be seen by reference to the statement in the initial volume,
to sum up _in toto_ the system of any philosopher, but to give a
"critical exposition" of some one masterpiece. In treating the
"Nouveaux Essais" of Leibniz, I have found myself obliged, at times,
to violate the letter of this expressed intention, in order to fulfil
its spirit. The "Nouveaux Essais," in spite of its being one of the
two most extended philosophical writings of Leibniz, is a compendium
of comments, rather than a connected argument or exposition. It has
all the suggestiveness and richness of a note-book, but with much also
of its fragmentariness. I have therefore been obliged to supplement my
account of it by constant references to the other writings of Leibniz,
and occasionally to take considerable liberty with the order of the
treatment of topics. Upon the whole, this book will be found, I hope,
to be a faithful reflex not only of Leibniz's thought, but also of his
discussions in the "Nouveaux Essais."
In the main, the course of philosophic thought since the time of
Leibniz has been such as to render almost self-evident his limitations,
and to suggest needed corrections and amplifications. Indeed, it is
much easier for those whose thoughts follow the turn that Kant has
given modern thinking to appreciate the defects of Leibniz than to
realize his greatness. I have endeavored, therefore, in the body
of the work, to identify my thought with that of Leibniz as much
as possible, to assume his standpoint and method, and, for the most
part, to confine express criticism upon his limitations to the final
chapter. In particular, I have attempted to bring out the relations
of philosophy to the growing science of his times, to state the
doctrine of pre-established harmony as he himself meant it, and to give
something like consistency and coherency to his doctrine of material
existence and of nature. This last task seemed especially to require
doing. I have also endeavored to keep in mind, throughout, Leibniz's
relations to Locke, and to show the "Nouveaux Essais" as typical of the
distinction between characteristic British and German thought.
JOHN DEWEY.
_May_, 1888.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Man.
PAGE
His Parents 1
His Early Education 2
His University Training at Leipsic 4
At Jena 8
At the University of Altdorf 10
His Removal to Frankfurt 10
His Mission to Paris 11
Discovery of the Calculus 12
Librarian at Hanover 13
His Activities 14
His Philosophic Writings 15
His Ecclesiastic and Academic Projects 17
His Later Years and Death 18
CHAPTER II.
Sources of his Philosophy.
Character of the Epoch into which Leibniz was born 20
The Thought of the Unity of the World 23
The two Agencies which formed Leibniz's Philosophy 24
The Cartesian Influences 26
Rationalistic Method 28
Mechanical Explanation of Nature 30
Application of Mathematics 32
Idea of Evolution 33
Interpretation of these Ideas 35
Idea of Activity or Entelechy 39
Idea of Rationality 40
Idea of Organism 42
CHAPTER III.
The Problem and its Solution.
Unity of Leibniz's Thought 43
Relation of Universal and Individual 44
Descartes' Treatment of this Question 46
Spinoza's Treatment of it 48
Leibniz's Solution 50
All Unity is Spiritual 53
And Active 54
Is a Representative Individual 56
Contrast of Monad and Atom 58
Pre-established Harmony reconciles Universal and Individual 59
Meaning of this Doctrine 62
CHAPTER IV.
Locke and Leibniz.--Innate Ideas.
Necessity of Preliminary Account of Leibniz's Philosophy 66
Locke's Empiricism 67
Leibniz's Comments upon Locke 69
The Controversies of Leibniz 72
The Essay on the Human Understanding 73
Locke's Denial of Innate Ideas 75
Depending upon
(1) His Mechanical Conception of Innate Ideas 77
Leibniz undermines this by substituting an Organic Conception 80
And upon
(2) His Mechanical Conception of Consciousness 84
Leibniz refutes this by his Theory of Unconscious Intelligence 85
CHAPTER V.
Sensation and Experience.
Importance of Doctrine regarding Sensation 87
The Two Elements of Locke's Notion of Sensation 89
Its Relation to the Object producing it: Primary and Secondary
Qualities 91
Locke criticized as to his Account
(1) Of the Production of Sensation 92
(2) Of its Function in Knowledge 95
The Meaning of Physical Causation 97
Bearing of this Doctrine upon Relation of Soul and Body 98
Criticism of Locke's Dualism 98
Leibniz's Monism 101
Summary of Discussion 103
Leibniz on the Relation of Sensations to Objects
occasioning them 105
Nature of Experience 106
Distinction of Empirical from Rational Knowledge 107
CHAPTER VI.
The Impulses and the Will.
The Doctrine of Will depends upon that of Intelligence 109
The Character of Impulse 111
Of Desire 112
Half-Pains and Pleasures 113
The Outcome of Desire 115
Nature of Moral Action 117
Of Freedom 118
(1) Freedom as Contingency 119
Limitation of this Principle 121
(2) Freedom as Spontaneity 123
This Principle is too Broad to be a Moral Principle 125
(3) True Freedom is Rational Action 125
Our Lack of Freedom is due to our Sensuous Nature 128
Innate Practical Principles 129
Moral Science is Demonstrative 130
CHAPTER VII.
Matter and its Relation to Spirit.
Locke's Account of Matter and Allied Ideas the Foundation of the
Philosophy of Nature Characteristic of British Empiricism 132
Space and Matter wholly Distinct Ideas 134
Leibniz gives Matter a Metaphysical Basis 137
Ordinary Misunderstanding of Leibniz's Ideas of Matter 138
Matter is not composed of Monads 139
Matter is the Passive or Conditioned Side of Monads 140
Passivity equals "Confused Representations," _i. e._ Incomplete
Development of Reason 144
Matter is logically Necessary from Leibniz's Principles 145
Bearing of Discussion upon Doctrine of Pre-established Harmony 146
Summary 147
CHAPTER VIII.
Material Phenomena and their Reality.
What is the Connection between Matter as Metaphysical and as
Physical? 151
The Latter is the "Image" of the Former 151
Leibniz's Reaction from Cartesian Theory 152
His Objections are (1) Physical and (2) Logical 153
(1) Motion is Source of Physical Qualities of Bodies 155
Hence there are no Atoms 158
Secondary Qualities as well as Primary depend upon Motion 160
(2) What is the Subject to which the Quality of Extension
belongs? 161
It is the Monad _as Passive_ 162
Space and Time connect the Spiritual and the Sensible 164
Distinction between Space and Time, and Extension and Duration 166
Space and Time are Relations 167
Leibniz's Controversy with Clarke 168
Leibniz denies that Space and Time are Absolute 170
What is the Reality of Sensible Phenomena? 173
It consists
(1) In their Regularity 174
(2) In their Dependence upon Intelligence and Will 175
Leibniz and Berkeley 177
CHAPTER IX.
Some Fundamental Conceptions.
Locke's Account of Substance as Static 179
The Distinction between Reality and Phenomena 180
Leibniz's Conception of Substance as Dynamic 181
His Specific Criticisms upon Locke 182
The Categories of Identity and Difference Locke also explains in
a Mechanical Way 183
Leibniz regards them as Internal and as Organic to each other 184
Locke gives a Quantitative Notion of Infinity 188
And hence makes our Idea of it purely Negative 189
Leibniz denies that the True Notion of Infinity is Quantitative 189
He also denies Locke's Account of the Origin of the Indefinite 192
In General, Locke has a Mechanical Idea, Leibniz a Spiritual, of
these Categories 193
CHAPTER X.
The Nature and Extent of Knowledge.
Locke's Definition and Classification of Knowledge 196
Leibniz's Criticism 197
Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant regarding Knowledge of Objects 198
The Degrees of Knowledge,--Intuitive, Demonstrative, and
Sensitive 199
Locke's Contradictory Theories regarding the Origin of Knowledge 202
Locke starts both with the Individual as given to Consciousness
and with the Unrelated Sensation 204
Either Theory makes Relations or "Universals" Unreal 205
As to the Extent of Knowledge, that of Identity is Wide, but
Trifling 205
That of Real Being includes God, Soul, and Matter, but only as to
their Existence 206
And even this at the Expense of contradicting his Definition of
Knowledge 206
Knowledge of Co-existence is either Trifling or Impossible 207
Leibniz rests upon Distinction of Contingent and Rational Truth 209
The Former may become the Latter, and is then Demonstrative 210
The Means of this Transformation are Mathematics and
Classification 215
There are Two Principles,--One of Contradiction 217
The Other of Sufficient Reason 218
The Latter leads us to God as the Supreme Intelligence and the
Final Condition of Contingent Fact 219
The Four Stages of Knowledge 222
CHAPTER XI.
The Theology of Leibniz.
Leibniz's Three Arguments for the Existence of God 224
The Value of the Ontological 225
The Cosmological 226
The Teleological 226
The Attributes of God 227
The Relation of God to the World, his Creating Activity 228
Creation involves Wisdom and Goodness as well as Power 229
The Relation of God to Intelligent Spirits: they form a Moral
Community 230
Leibniz as the Founder of Modern German Ethical Systems 231
The End of Morality is Happiness as Self-realization 232
The Three Stages of Natural Right 234
The Basis of Both Leibniz's Ethics and Political Philosophy is
Man's Relation to God 236
His Æsthetics have the Same Basis 237
Man's Spirit as Architectonic 238
CHAPTER XII.
Criticism and Conclusion.
Leibniz's Fundamental Contradiction is between his Method and his
Subject Matter 240
The Use which Leibniz makes of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
reveals this Contradiction 242
The Contradiction is between the Ideas of Formal and of Concrete
Unity 243
From this Contradiction flow
(1) The Contradiction in the Notion of Individuality 246
Which becomes purely Negative 247
The Negative he interprets as merely Privative 249
(2) The Contradiction in his Conception of God has the Same
Source 250
He really has Three Definitions of God 250
One results in Atomism, another in Pantheism 251
The Third in a Conception of the Organic Harmony of the
Infinite and Finite 252
(3) The Contradiction between the Real and the Ideal in the
Monads has the Same Source 253
(4) As have also the Contradictions in the Treatment of the
Relations of Matter and Spirit 254
(5) And finally, his Original Contradiction leads to a
Contradictory Treatment of Knowledge 257
Summary as to the Positive Value of Leibniz 259
The Influence of Leibniz's Philosophy 261
Especially upon Kant 262
Kant claims to be the True Apologist for Leibniz 263
(1) As to the Doctrine of Sufficient Reason and Contradiction 263
Which finds its Kantian Analogue in the Distinction between
Analytic and Synthetic Judgment 266
(2) As to the Relation of Monads and Matter 268
Which finds its Kantian Analogue in the Relation of the
Sensuous and Supersensuous 268
(3) And finally, as to the Doctrine of Pre-established Harmony 269
Which Kant transforms into Harmony between Understanding
and Sense 269
And between the Categories of the Understanding and the
Ideas of Reason 270
Conclusion 272
LEIBNIZ'S NEW ESSAYS CONCERNING THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.
CHAPTER I.
THE MAN.
"He who knows me only by my writings does not know me," said
Leibniz. These words--true, indeed, of every writer, but true of
Leibniz in a way which gives a peculiar interest and charm to his
life--must be our excuse for prefacing what is to be said of his "New
Essays concerning the Human Understanding" with a brief biographical
sketch.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig June 21, 1646. His
father, who died when Leibniz was only six years old, was a professor
in the university and a notary of considerable practice. From him the
future philosopher seems to have derived his extraordinary industry
and love of detail. Such accounts as we have of him show no traces of
the wonderful intellectual genius of his son, but only a diligent,
plodding, faithful, and religious man, a thoroughly conscientious
husband, jurist, and professor. Nor in the lines of physical heredity
can we account for the unique career of Leibniz by his mother's
endowments. The fact, however, that she was patient in all trial,
living in peace with her neighbors, anxious for unity and concord with
all people, even with those not well disposed to her, throws great
light upon the fundamental trait of Leibniz's ethical nature. As in so
many cases, it is the inherited moral characteristics which form the
basis of the intellectual nature. The love of unity which was a moral
trait in Leibniz's mother became in him the hunger for a harmonious and
unified mental world; the father's devotion to detail showed itself
as the desire for knowledge as minute and comprehensive as it was
inter-related.
Left without his father, he was by the advice of a discerning friend
allowed free access to the library. Leibniz never ceased to count this
one of the greatest fortunes of his life. Writing in after years to a
friend, he says:--
"When I lost my father, and was left without any direction in my
studies, I had the luck to get at books in all languages, of all
religions, upon all sciences, and to read them without any regular
order, just as my own impulse led me. From this I obtained the great
advantage that I was freed from ordinary prejudices, and introduced to
many things of which I should otherwise never have thought."
In a philosophical essay, in which he describes himself under the name
of Gulielmus Pacidius, he says:--
"Wilhelm Friedlieb, a German by birth, who lost his father in his early
years, was led to study through the innate tendency of his spirit; and
the freedom with which he moved about in the sciences was equal to this
innate impulse. He buried himself, a boy eight years old, in a library,
staying there sometimes whole days, and, hardly stammering Latin, he
took up every book which pleased his eyes. Opening and shutting them
without any choice, he sipped now here, now there, lost himself in one,
skipped over another, as the clearness of expression or of content
attracted him. He seemed to be directed by the _Tolle et lege_ of a
higher voice. As good fortune would have it, he gave himself up to the
ancients, in whom he at first understood nothing, by degrees a little,
finally all that was really necessary, until he assumed not only a
certain coloring of their expression, but also of their thought,--just
as those who go about in the sun, even while they are occupied with
other things, get sun-browned."
And he goes on to tell us that their influence always remained
with him. Their human, their important, their comprehensive ideas,
grasping the whole of life in one image, together with their clear,
natural, and transparent mode of expression, adapted precisely to
their thoughts, seemed to him to be in the greatest contrast with the
writings of moderns, without definiteness or order in expression, and
without vitality or purpose in thought,--"written as if for another
world." Thus Leibniz learned two of the great lessons of his life,--to
seek always for clearness of diction and for pertinence and purpose
of ideas.
Historians and poets first occupied him; but when in his school-life,
a lad of twelve or thirteen years, he came to the study of logic,
he was greatly struck, he says, by the "ordering and analysis
of thoughts which he found there." He gave himself up to making
tables of categories and predicaments, analyzing each book that he
read into suitable topics, and arranging these into classes and
sub-classes. We can imagine the astonishment of his playmates as
he burst upon them with a demand to classify this or that idea, to
find its appropriate predicament. Thus he was led naturally to the
philosophic books in his father's library,--to Plato and to Aristotle,
to the Scholastics. Suarez, in particular, among the latter, he read;
and traces of his influences are to be found in the formulation of his
own philosophic system. At about this same time he took great delight
in the theological works with which his father's library abounded,
reading with equal ease and pleasure the writings of the Lutherans
and of the Reformed Church, of the Jesuits and the Jansenists, of the
Thomists and the Arminians. The result was, he tells us, that he was
strengthened in the Lutheran faith of his family, but, as we may easily
imagine from his after life, made tolerant of all forms of faith.
In 1661 the boy Leibniz, fifteen years old, entered the University of
Leipzig. If we glance back upon his attainments, we find him thoroughly
at home in Latin, having made good progress in Greek, acquainted with
the historians and poets of antiquity, acquainted with the contemporary
range of science, except in mathematics and physics, deeply read and
interested in ancient and scholastic philosophy and in the current
theological discussions. Of himself he says:--
"Two things were of extraordinary aid to me: in the first place, I was
self-taught; and in the second, as soon as I entered upon any science
I sought for something new, even though I did not as yet thoroughly
understand the old. I thus gained two things: I did not fill my mind
with things empty and to be unlearned afterwards,--things resting
upon the assertion of the teacher, and not upon reason; and secondly,
I never rested till I got down to the very roots of the science and
reached its principles."
While there is always a temptation to force the facts which we know
of a man's early life, so as to make them seem to account for what
appears in mature years, and to find symbolisms and analogies which do
not exist, we are not going astray, I think, if we see foreshadowed in
this early education of Leibniz the two leading traits of his later
thought,--universality and individuality. The range of Leibniz's
investigations already marks him as one who will be content with
no fundamental principle which does not mirror the universe. The
freedom with which he carried them on is testimony to the fact
that even at this age the idea of self-development, of individual
growth from within, was working upon him. In the fact, also, that he
was self-taught we find doubtless the reason that he alone of the
thinkers of this period did not have to retrace his steps, to take
a hostile attitude towards the ideas into which he was educated, and
to start anew upon a foundation then first built. The development of
the thought of Leibniz is so gradual, continuous, and constant that it
may serve as a model of the law by which the "monad" acts. Is not his
early acquaintance with ancient literature and mediæval philosophy
the reason that he could afterwards write that his philosophical
system "connects Plato with Democritus, Aristotle with Descartes, the
Scholastics with the moderns, theology and morals with reason"? And
who can fail to see in the impartiality, the comprehensiveness, of
his self-education the prophecy of the time when he can write of his
ideas that "there are united in them, as in a centre of perspective,
the ideas of the Sceptics in attributing to sensible things only
a slight degree of reality; of the Pythagoreans and Platonists,
who reduce all to harmonies, numbers, and ideas; of Parmenides and
Plotinus, with their One and All; of the Stoics, with their notion of
necessity, compatible with the spontaneity of other schools; of the
vital philosophy of the Cabalists, who find feeling everywhere; of the
forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, united with the
mechanical explanation of phenomena according to Democritus and the
moderns"?
But we must hurry along over the succeeding years of his life. In
the university the study of law was his principal occupation, as he
had decided to follow in the footsteps of his father. It cannot be
said that the character of the instruction or of the instructors at
Leipzig was such as to give much nutriment or stimulus to a mind like
that of Leibniz. He became acquainted there, however, with the Italian
philosophy of the sixteenth century,--a philosophy which, as formulated
by Cardanus and Campanella, formed the transition from Scholastic
philosophy to the "mechanical" mode of viewing the universe. He had
here also his first introduction to Descartes. The consequences of the
new vision opened to Leibniz must be told in his own words: "I was but
a child when I came to know Aristotle; even the Scholastics did not
frighten me; and I in no way regret this now. Plato and Plotinus gave
me much delight, not to speak of other philosophers of antiquity. Then
I fell in with the writings of modern philosophy, and I recall the
time when, a boy of fifteen years, I went walking in a little wood
near Leipzig, the Rosenthal, in order to consider whether I should
hold to the doctrine of substantial forms. Finally the mechanical
theory conquered, and thus I was led to the study of the mathematical
sciences."
To the study of the mathematical sciences! Surely words of no mean
import for either the future of Leibniz or of mathematics. But his
Leipzig studies did not take him very far in this new direction. Only
the elements of Euclid were taught there, and these by a lecturer
of such confused style that Leibniz seems alone to have understood
them. In Jena, however, where he went for a semester, things were
somewhat better. Weigel, a mathematician of some fame, an astronomer,
a jurist, and a philosopher, taught there, and introduced Leibniz
into the lower forms of analysis. But the Thirty Years' War had not
left Germany in a state of high culture, and in after years Leibniz
lamented the limitations of his early mathematical training, remarking
that if he had spent his youth in Paris, he would have enriched science
earlier. By 1666 Leibniz had finished his university career, having
in previous years attained the degrees of bachelor of philosophy and
master of philosophy. It is significant that for the first he wrote
a thesis upon the principle of individuation,--the principle which
in later years became the basis of his philosophy. This early essay,
however, is rather an exhibition of learning and of dexterity in
handling logical methods than a real anticipation of his afterthought.
For his second degree, he wrote a thesis upon the application
of philosophic ideas to juridic procedure,--considerations which
never ceased to occupy him. At about the same time appeared his
earliest independent work, "De Arte Combinatoria." From his study of
mathematics, and especially of algebraic methods, Leibniz had become
convinced that the source of all science is,--first, analysis; second,
symbolic representation of the fundamental concepts, the symbolism
avoiding the ambiguities and vagueness of language; and thirdly,
the synthesis and interpretation of the symbols. It seemed to Leibniz
that it ought to be possible to find the simplest notions in all the
sciences, to discover general rules for calculating all their varieties
of combination, and thus to attain the same certainty and generality
of result that characterize mathematics. Leibniz never gave up this
thought. Indeed, in spirit his philosophy is but its application,
with the omission of symbols, on the side of the general notions
fundamental to all science. It was also the idea of his age,--the
idea that inspired Spinoza and the _Aufklärung_, the idea that
inspired philosophical thinking until Kant gave it its death-blow by
demonstrating the distinction between the methods of philosophy and of
mathematical and physical science.
In 1666 Leibniz should have received his double doctorate of philosophy
and of law; but petty jealousies and personal fears prevented his
presenting himself for the examination. Disgusted with his treatment,
feeling that the ties that bound him to Leipzig were severed by the
recent death of his mother, anxious to study mathematics further,
and, as he confesses, desiring, with the natural eagerness of youth,
to see more of the world, he left Leipzig forever, and entered upon
his _Wanderjahre_. He was prepared to be no mean citizen of the
world. In his education he had gone from the historians to the poets,
from the poets to the philosophers and the Scholastics, from them
to the theologians and Church Fathers; then to the jurists, to the
mathematicians, and then again to philosophy and to law.
He first directed his steps to the University of Altdorf; here he
obtained his doctorate in law, and was offered a professorship,
which he declined,--apparently because he felt that his time was
not yet come, and that when it should come, it would not be in
the narrow limits of a country village. From Altdorf he went to
Nürnberg; here all that need concern us is the fact that he joined a
society of alchemists (_fraternitas roseæcrucis_), and was made their
secretary. Hereby he gained three things,--a knowledge of chemistry; an
acquaintance with a number of scientific men of different countries,
with whom, as secretary, he carried on correspondence; and the
friendship of Boineburg, a diplomat of the court of the Elector and
Archbishop of Mainz. This friendship was the means of his removing
to Frankfurt. Here, under the direction of the Elector, he engaged
in remodelling Roman law so as to adapt it for German use, in writing
diplomatic tracts, letters, and essays upon theological matters, and
in editing an edition of Nizolius,--a now forgotten philosophical
writer. One of the most noteworthy facts in connection with this
edition is that Leibniz pointed out the fitness of the German language
for philosophical uses, and urged its employment,--a memorable fact
in connection with the later development of German thought. Another
important tract which he wrote was one urging the alliance of
all German States for the purpose of advancing their internal
and common interests. Here, as so often, Leibniz was almost two
centuries in advance of his times. But the chief thing in connection
with the stay of Leibniz at Mainz was the cause for which he left
it. Louis XIV. had broken up the Triple Alliance, and showed signs of
attacking Holland and the German Empire. It was then proposed to him
that it would be of greater glory to himself and of greater advantage
to France that he should move against Turkey and Egypt. The mission of
presenting these ideas to the great king was intrusted to Leibniz, and
in 1672 he went to Paris.
The plan failed completely,--so completely that we need say no
more about it. But the journey to Paris was none the less the
turning-point in the career of Leibniz. It brought him to the
centre of intellectual civilization,--to a centre compared with
which the highest attainments of disrupted and disheartened Germany
were comparative barbarism. Molière was still alive, and Racine was
at the summit of his glory. Leibniz became acquainted with Arnaud,
a disciple of Descartes, who initiated him into the motive and spirit
of his master. Cartesianism as a system, with its scientific basis and
its speculative consequences, thus first became to him an intellectual
reality. And, perhaps most important of all, he met Huygens, who became
his teacher and inspirer both in the higher forms of mathematics
and in their application to the interpretation and expression of
physical phenomena. His diplomatic mission took him also to London,
where the growing world of mathematical science was opened yet wider to
him. The name of Sir Isaac Newton need only be given to show what this
meant. From this time one of the greatest glories of Leibniz's life
dates,--a glory, however, which during his lifetime was embittered by
envy and unappreciation, and obscured by detraction and malice,--the
invention of the infinitesimal calculus. It would be interesting, were
this the place, to trace the history of its discovery,--the gradual
steps which led to it, the physical facts as well as mathematical
theories which made it a necessity; but it must suffice to mention that
these were such that the discovery of some general mode of expressing
and interpreting the newly discovered facts of Nature was absolutely
required for the further advance of science, and that steps towards
the introduction of the fundamental ideas of the calculus had already
been taken,--notably by Keppler, by Cavalieri, and by Wallis. It
would be interesting to follow also the course of the controversy
with Newton,--a controversy which in its method of conduct reflects no
credit upon the names of either. But this can be summed up by saying
that it is now generally admitted that absolute priority belongs to
Newton, but that entire independence and originality characterize
none the less the work of Leibniz, and that the method of approach and
statement of the latter are the more philosophical and general, and,
to use the words of the judicious summary of Merz, "Newton cared more
for the results than the principle, while Leibniz was in search of
fundamental principles, and anxious to arrive at simplifications and
generalizations."
The death of Boineburg removed the especial reasons for the return of
Leibniz to Frankfurt, and in 1676 he accepted the position of librarian
and private councillor at the court of Hanover. It arouses our interest
and our questionings to know that on his journey back he stopped at the
Hague, and there met face to face the other future great philosopher
of the time, Spinoza. But our questionings meet no answer. At Hanover,
the industries of Leibniz were varied. An extract from one of his own
letters, though written at a somewhat later date, will give the best
outline of his activities.
"It is incredible how scattered and divided are my occupations. I
burrow through archives, investigate old writings, and collect
unprinted manuscripts, with a view to throwing light on the
history of Brunswick. I also receive and write a countless number of
letters. I have so much that is new in mathematics, so many thoughts
in philosophy, so many literary observations which I cannot get into
shape, that in the midst of my tasks I do not know where to begin,
and with Ovid am inclined to cry out: 'My riches make me poor.' I
should like to give a description of my calculating-machine; but time
fails. Above all else I desire to complete my Dynamics, as I think
that I have finally discovered the true laws of material Nature, by
whose means problems about bodies which are out of reach of rules now
known may be solved. Friends are urging me to publish my Science of
the Infinite, containing the basis of my new analysis. I have also on
hand a new Characteristic, and many general considerations about the
art of discovery. But all these works, the historical excepted, have
to be done at odd moments. Then at the court all sorts of things are
expected. I have to answer questions on points in international law;
on points concerning the rights of the various princes in the Empire:
so far I have managed to keep out of questions of private law. With all
this I have had to carry on negotiations with the bishops of Neustadt
and of Meaux [Bossuet], and with Pelisson and others upon religious
matters."
It is interesting to note how the philosophic spirit, the instinct
for unity and generality, showed itself even in the least of Leibniz's
tasks. The Duke of Brunswick imposed upon Leibniz the task of drawing
up a genealogical table of his House. Under Leibniz's hands this
expanded into a history of the House, and this in turn was the centre
of an important study of the German Empire. It was impossible that
the philosopher, according to whom every real being reflected the
whole of the universe from its point of view, should have been able to
treat even a slight phase of local history without regarding it in its
relations to the history of the world. Similarly some mining operations
in the Harz Mountains called the attention of Leibniz to geological
matters. The result was a treatise called "Protogäa," in which Leibniz
gave a history of the development of the earth. Not content with seeing
in a Brunswick mountain an epitome of the world's physical formation,
it was his intention to make this an introduction to his political
history as a sort of geographical background and foundation. It is
interesting to note that the historical studies of Leibniz took him on
a three years' journey, from 1687 to 1690, through the various courts
of Europe,--a fact which not only had considerable influence upon
Leibniz himself, but which enabled him to give stimulus to scientific
development in more ways and places than one.
His philosophical career as an author begins for the most part with
his return to Hanover in 1690. This lies outside of the scope of the
present chapter, but here is a convenient place to call attention to
the fact that for Leibniz the multitude of his other duties was so
great that his philosophical work was the work "of odd moments." There
is no systematic exposition; there are a vast number of letters, of
essays, of abstracts and memoranda published in various scientific
journals. His philosophy bears not only in form, but in substance,
traces of its haphazard and desultory origin. Another point of
interest in this connection is the degree to which, in form, at least,
his philosophical writings bear the impress of his cosmopolitan
life. Leibniz had seen too much of the world, too much of courts,
for his thoughts to take the rigid and unbending form of geometrical
exposition suited to the lonely student of the Hague. Nor was the
regular progression and elucidation of ideas adapted to the later
Germans, almost without exception university professors, suited to
the man of affairs. There is everywhere in Leibniz the attempt to
adapt his modes of statement, not only to the terminology, but even
to the ideas, of the one to whom they are addressed. There is the
desire to magnify points of agreement, to minimize disagreements,
characteristic of the courtier and the diplomat. His comprehensiveness
is not only a comprehensiveness of thought, but of ways of exposition,
due very largely, we must think, to his cosmopolitan education. The
result has been to the great detriment of Leibniz's influence as a
systematic thinker, although it may be argued that it has aided his
indirect and suggestive influence, the absorption of his ideas by men
of literature, by Goethe, above all by Lessing, and his stimulating
effect upon science and philosophy. It is certain that the attempt to
systematize his thoughts, as was done by Wolff, had for its result the
disappearance of all that was profound and thought-exciting.
If his philosophy thus reflects the manner of his daily life,
the occupations of the latter were informed by the spirit of
his philosophy. Two of the dearest interests of Leibniz remain
to be mentioned,--one, the founding of academies; the other, the
reconciling of religious organizations. The former testifies to his
desire for comprehensiveness, unity, and organization of knowledge;
the latter to his desire for practical unity, his dislike of all
that is opposed and isolated. His efforts in the religions direction
were twofold. The first was to end the theological and political
controversies of the time by the reunion of the Protestant and Roman
Catholic Churches. It was a plan which did the greatest honor to the
pacific spirit of Leibniz, but it was predestined to failure. Both
sides made concessions,--more concessions than we of to-day should
believe possible. But the one thing the Roman Catholic Church would not
concede was the one thing which the Protestant Church demanded,--the
notion of authority and hierarchy. Indeed, it may be questioned whether
the terms on which Leibniz conceived of their reunion do not point to
the greatest weakness in his philosophy,--the tendency to overlook
oppositions and to resolve all contradiction into differences of
degree. Hardly had this plan fallen through when Leibniz turned to
the project of a union of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the
Protestant Church. This scheme was more hopeful, and while unrealized
during the life of our philosopher, was afterwards accomplished.
It is noteworthy that even before Leibniz went to Paris and to
London he had conceived the idea of a society of learned men for the
investigation, the systematization, and the publication of scientific
truth in all its varied forms,--a society which should in breadth
include the whole sphere of sciences, but should not treat them as so
many isolated disciplines, but as members of one system. This idea
was quickened when Leibniz saw the degree in which it had already
been realized in the two great world-capitals. He never ceased to
try to introduce similar academies wherever he had influence. In
1700 his labors bore their fruit in one instance. The Academy at
Berlin was founded, and Leibniz was its first, and indeed life-long,
president. But disappointment met him at Vienna, Dresden, and
St. Petersburg, where he proposed similar societies.
Any sketch of Leibniz's life, however brief, would be imperfect which
did not mention the names at least of two remarkable women,--remarkable
in themselves, and remarkable in their friendship with Leibniz. These
were Sophia, grand-daughter of James I. of England (and thus
the link by which the House of Brunswick finally came to rule over
Great Britain) and wife of the Duke of Brunswick, and her daughter
Sophia Charlotte, wife of the first king of Prussia. The latter,
in particular, gave Leibniz every encouragement. She was personally
deeply interested in all theological and philosophical questions. Upon
her death-bed, in 1705, she is said to have told those about her that
they were not to mourn for her, as she should now be able to satisfy
her desire to learn about things which Leibniz had never sufficiently
explained.
Her death marks the beginning of a period in Leibniz's life which it is
not pleasant to dwell upon. New rulers arose that knew not Leibniz. It
cannot be said that from this time till his death in Hanover in 1716
Leibniz had much joy or satisfaction. His best friends were dead; his
political ambitions were disappointed; he was suspected of coldness
and unfriendliness by the courts both of Berlin and Hanover; Paris and
Vienna were closed to him, so far as any wide influence was concerned,
by his religious faith; the controversy with the friends of Newton
still followed him. He was a man of the most remarkable intellectual
gifts, of an energy which could be satisfied only with wide fields
of action; and he found himself shut in by narrow intrigue to a petty
round of courtly officialism. It is little wonder that the following
words fell from his lips: "Germany is the only country in the world
that does not know how to recognize the fame of its children and to
make that fame immortal. It forgets itself; it forgets its own, unless
foreigners make it mindful of its own treasures." A Scotch friend of
Leibniz, who happened to be in Hanover when he died, wrote that Leibniz
"was buried more like a robber than what he really was,--the ornament
of his country." Such was the mortal end of the greatest intellectual
genius since Aristotle. But genius is not a matter to be bounded in
life or in death by provincial courts. Leibniz remains a foremost
citizen in that "Kingdom of Spirits" in whose formation he found the
meaning of the world.
CHAPTER II.
THE SOURCES OF HIS PHILOSOPHY.
What is true of all men is true of philosophers, and of Leibniz
among them. Speaking generally, what they are unconsciously and
fundamentally, they are through absorption of their antecedents
and surroundings. What they are consciously and reflectively,
they are through their reaction upon the influence of heredity
and environment. But there is a spiritual line of descent and a
spiritual atmosphere; and in speaking of a philosopher, it is with this
intellectual heredity and environment, rather than with the physical,
that we are concerned. Leibniz was born into a period of intellectual
activity the most teeming with ideas, the most fruitful in results,
of any, perhaps, since the age of Pericles. We pride ourselves justly
upon the activity of our own century, and in diffusion of intellectual
action and wide-spread application of ideas the age of Leibniz
could not compare with it. But ours _is_ the age of diffusion and
application, while his was one of fermentation and birth.
Such a period in its earlier days is apt to be turbid and
unsettled. There is more heat of friction than calm light. And such had
been the case in the hundred years before Leibniz. But when he arrived
at intellectual maturity much of the crudity had disappeared. The
troubling of the waters of thought had ceased; they were becoming
clarified. Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, each had crystallized something
out of that seething and chaotic mass of new ideas which had forced
itself into European consciousness. Men had been introduced into a
new world, and the natural result had been feelings of strangeness,
and the vagaries of intellectual wanderings. But by the day of Leibniz
the intellectual bearings had been made out anew, the new mental
orientation had been secured.
The marks of this "new spiritual picture of the universe" are
everywhere to be seen in Leibniz. His philosophy is the dawning
consciousness of the modern world. In it we see the very conception and
birth of the modern interpretation of the world. The history of thought
is one continuous testimony to the ease with which we become hardened
to ideas through custom. Ideas are constantly precipitating themselves
out of the realm of ideas into that of ways of thinking and of viewing
the universe. The problem of one century is the axiom of another. What
one generation stakes its activity upon investigating is quietly taken
for granted by the next. And so the highest reach of intellectual
inspiration in the sixteenth century is to-day the ordinary food of
thought, accepted without an inquiry as to its source, and almost
without a suspicion that it has a recent historic origin. We have to
go to Bacon or to Leibniz to see the genesis and growth of those ideas
which to-day have become materialized into axiomatic points of view
and into hard-and-fast categories of thought. In reading Leibniz the
idea comes over us in all its freshness that there was a time when
it was a discovery that the world is a universe, made after one plan
and of one stuff. The ideas of inter-relation, of the harmony of law,
of mutual dependence and correspondence, were not always the assumed
starting-points of thought; they were once the crowning discoveries
of a philosophy aglow and almost intoxicated with the splendor of its
far-reaching generalizations. I take these examples of the unity of
the world, the continuity and interdependence of all within it, because
these are the ideas which come to their conscious and delighted birth
in the philosophy of Leibniz. We do not put ourselves into the right
attitude for understanding his thought until we remember that these
ideas--the commonest tools of our thinking--were once new and fresh,
and in their novelty and transforming strangeness were the products
of a philosophic interpretation of experience. Except in that later
contemporary of Leibniz, the young and enthusiastic Irish idealist,
Berkeley, I know of no historic thinker in whom the birth-throes
(joyous, however) of a new conception of the world are so evident as
in Leibniz. But while in Berkeley what we see is the young man carried
away and astounded by the grandeur and simplicity of a "new way of
ideas" which he has discovered, what we see in Leibniz is the mature
man penetrated throughout his being with an idea which in its unity
answers to the unity of the world, and which in its complexity answers,
tone to tone, to the complex harmony of the world.
The familiarity of the ideas which we use hides their grandeur from
us. The unity of the world is a matter of course with us; the dependent
order of all within it a mere starting-point upon which to base
our investigations. But if we will put ourselves in the position of
Leibniz, and behold, not the new planet, but the new universe, so one,
so linked together, swimming into our ken, we shall feel something of
the same exultant thrill that Leibniz felt,--an exultation not indeed
personal in its nature, but which arises from the expansion of the
human mind face to face with an expanding world. The spirit which is at
the heart of the philosophy of Leibniz is the spirit which speaks in the
following words: "Quin imo qui unam partem materiæ comprehenderet, idem
comprehenderet totum universum ob eandem ~perichôrêsin~ quam dixi. Mea
principia talia sunt, ut vix a se invicem develli possint. Qui unum bene
novit, omnia novit." It is a spirit which feels that the secret of the
universe has been rendered up to it, and which breathes a buoyant
optimism. And if we of the nineteenth century have chosen to bewail
the complexity of the problem of life, and to run hither and thither
multiplying "insights" and points of view till this enthusiastic
confidence in reason seems to us the rashness of an ignorance which does
not comprehend the problem, and the unity in which Leibniz rested
appears cold and abstract beside the manifold richness of the world, we
should not forget that after all we have incorporated into our very
mental structure the fundamental thoughts of Leibniz,--the thoughts of
the rationality of the universe and of the "reign of law."
What was the origin of these ideas in the mind of Leibniz? What
influences in the philosophic succession of thinkers led him in this
direction? What agencies acting in the intellectual world about him
shaped his ideal reproduction of reality? Two causes above all others
stand out with prominence,--one, the discoveries and principles of
modern physical science; the other, that interpretation of experience
which centuries before had been formulated by Aristotle. Leibniz has a
double interest for those of to-day who reverence science and who hold
to the historical method. His philosophy was an attempt to set in order
the methods and principles of that growing science of nature which
even then was transforming the emotional and mental life of Europe;
and the attempt was guided everywhere by a profound and wide-reaching
knowledge of the history of philosophy. On the first point Leibniz
was certainly not alone. Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, each felt
in his own way the fructifying touch of the new-springing science,
and had attempted under its guidance to interpret the facts of nature
and of man. But Leibniz stood alone in his interest in the history of
thought. He stands alone indeed till he is greeted by his compeers
of the nineteenth century. To Bacon previous philosophy--the Greek,
the scholastic--was an "eidol of the theatre." The human mind must be
freed from its benumbing influence. To Descartes it was useless rubbish
to be cleared away, that we might get a _tabula rasa_ upon which to
make a fresh start. And shall Locke and the empirical English school,
or Reid and the Scotch school, or even Kant, be the first to throw a
stone at Bacon and Descartes? It was reserved to Leibniz, with a genius
almost two centuries in advance of his times, to penetrate the meaning
of the previous development of reflective thought. It would be going
beyond our brief to claim that Leibniz was interested in this _as_ a
historical movement, or that he specially concerned himself with the
genetic lines which connected the various schools of thought. But we
should come short of our duty to Leibniz if we did not recognize his
conscious and largely successful attempt to apprehend the core of truth
in all systems, however alien to his own, and to incorporate it into
his own thinking.
Nothing could be more characteristic of Leibniz than his saying,
"I find that most systems are right in a good share of that which
they advance, but not so much in what they deny;" or than this other
statement of his, "We must not hastily believe that which the mass
of men, or even of authorities, advance, but each must demand for
himself the proofs of the thesis sustained. Yet long research generally
convinces that the old and received opinions are good, provided they
be interpreted justly." It is in the profound union in Leibniz of
the principles which these quotations image that his abiding worth
lies. Leibniz was interested in affirmations, not in denials. He was
interested in securing the union of the modern _method_, the spirit
of original research and independent judgment, with the conserved
_results_ of previous thought. Leibniz was a man of his times; that is
to say, he was a scientific man,--the contemporary, for example, of men
as different as Bernouilli, Swammerdam, Huygens, and Newton, and was
himself actively engaged in the prosecution of mathematics, mechanics,
geology, comparative philology, and jurisprudence. But he was also a
man of Aristotle's times,--that is to say, a philosopher, not satisfied
until the facts, principles, and methods of science had received an
interpretation which should explain and unify them.
Leibniz's acquaintance with the higher forms of mathematics was
due, as we have seen, to his acquaintance with Huygens. As he made
the acquaintance of the latter at the same time that he made the
acquaintance of the followers of Descartes, it is likely that he
received his introduction to the higher developments of the scientific
interpretation of nature and of the philosophic interpretation of
science at about the same time. For a while, then, Leibniz was a
Cartesian; and he never ceased to call the doctrine of Descartes
the antechamber of truth. What were the ideas which he received from
Descartes? Fundamentally they were two,--one about the method of truth,
the other about the substance of truth. He received the idea that the
method of philosophy consists in the analysis of any complex group of
ideas down to simple ideas which shall be perfectly clear and distinct;
that all such clear and distinct ideas are true, and may then be used
for the synthetic reconstruction of any body of truth. Concerning
the substance of philosophic truth, he learned that nature is to be
interpreted mechanically, and that the instrument of this mechanical
interpretation is mathematics. I have used the term "received" in
speaking of the relation of Leibniz to these ideas. Yet long before
this time we might see him giving himself up to dreams about a vast
art of combination which should reduce all the ideas concerned in
any science to their simplest elements, and then combine them to any
degree of complexity. We have already seen him giving us a picture
of a boy of fifteen gravely disputing with himself whether he shall
accept the doctrine of forms and final causes, or of physical causes,
and as gravely deciding that he shall side with the "moderns;" and
that boy was himself. In these facts we have renewed confirmation of
the truth that one mind never receives from another anything excepting
the stimulus, the reflex, the development of ideas which have already
possessed it. But when Leibniz, with his isolated and somewhat
ill-digested thoughts, came in contact with that systematized and
connected body of doctrines which the Cartesians presented to him in
Paris, his ideas were quickened, and he felt the necessity--that final
mark of the philosophic mind--of putting them in order.
About the method of Descartes, which Leibniz adopted from him, or
rather formulated for himself under the influence of Descartes,
not much need be said. It was the method of Continental thought
till the time of Kant. It was the mother of the philosophic systems
of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. It was equally the mother of
the German _Aufklärung_ and the French _éclaircissement_. Its
fundamental idea is the thought upon which Rationalism everywhere bases
itself. It says: Reduce everything to simple notions. Get clearness;
get distinctness. Analyze the complex. Shun the obscure. Discover
axioms; employ these axioms in connection with the simple notions,
and build up from them. Whatever can be treated in this way is capable
of proof, and only this. Leibniz, I repeat, possessed this method in
common with Descartes and Spinoza. The certainty and demonstrativeness
of mathematics stood out in the clearest contrast to the uncertainty,
the obscurity, of all other knowledge. And to them, as to all before
the days of Kant, it seemed beyond doubt that the method of mathematics
consists in the analysis of notions, and in their synthesis through the
medium of axioms, which are true because identical statements; while
the notions are true because clear and distinct.
And yet the method led Leibniz in a very different direction. One of
the fundamental doctrines, for example, of Leibniz is the existence
everywhere of minute and obscure perceptions,--which are of the
greatest importance, but of which we, at least, can never have
distinct consciousness. How is this factor of his thought, which
almost approaches mysticism, to be reconciled with the statements just
made? It is found in the different application which is made of the
method. The object of Descartes is the _erection of a new structure
of truth_ upon a _tabula rasa_ of all former doctrines. The object of
Leibniz is the _interpretation of an old body of truth_ by a method
which shall reveal it in its clearest light. Descartes and Spinoza
are "rationalists" both in their method and results. Leibniz is a
"rationalist" in his method; but his application of the method is
everywhere controlled by historic considerations. It is, I think,
impossible to over-emphasize this fact. Descartes was profoundly
convinced that past thought had gone wrong, and that its results were
worthless. Leibniz was as profoundly convinced that its instincts had
been right, and that the general idea of the world which it gave was
correct. Leibniz would have given the heartiest assent to Goethe's
saying, "Das Wahre war schon längst gefunden." It was out of the
question, then, that he should use the new method in any other than an
interpreting way to bring out in a connected system and unity the true
meaning of the subject-matter.
So much of generality for the method of Leibniz. The positive substance
of doctrine which he developed under scientific influence affords
matter for more discussion. Of the three influences which meet us here,
two are still Cartesian; the third is from the new science of biology,
although not yet answering to that name. These three influences are, in
order: the idea that nature is to be explained mechanically; that this
is to be brought about through the application of mathematics; and,
from biology, the idea that all change is of the nature of continuous
growth or unfolding. Let us consider each in this order.
What is meant by the mechanical explanation of nature? To answer a
question thus baldly put, we must recall the kind of explanations which
had satisfied the scholastic men of science. They had been explanations
which, however true, Leibniz says, as general principles, do not touch
the details of the matter. The explanations of natural facts had been
found in general principles, in substantial forces, in occult essences,
in native faculties. Now, the first contention of the founders of the
modern scientific movement was that such general considerations are
not verifiable, and that if they are, they are entirely aside from the
point,--they fail to explain any given fact. Explanation must always
consist in discovering an immediate connection between some fact and
some co-existing or preceding fact. Explanation does not consist in
referring a fact to a general power, it consists in referring it to an
antecedent whose existence is its necessary condition. It was not left
till the times of Mr. Huxley to poke fun at those who would explain
some concrete phenomenon by reference to an abstract principle ending
in --ity. Leibniz has his word to say about those who would account for
the movements of a watch by reference to a principle of horologity, and
of mill-stones by a fractive principle.
Mechanical explanation consists, accordingly, in making out an actual
connection between two existing facts. But this does not say very
much. A connection of what kind? In the first place, a connection of
the same order as the facts observed. If we are explaining corporeal
phenomena, we must find a corporeal link; if we are explaining
phenomena of motion, we must find a connection of motion. In one of his
first philosophical works Leibniz, in taking the mechanical position,
states what he means by it. In the "Confession of Nature against the
Atheists" he says that it must be confessed to those who have revived
the corpuscular theory of Democritus and Epicurus, to Galileo, Bacon,
Gassendi, Hobbes, and Descartes, that in explaining material phenomena
recourse is to be had neither to God nor to any other incorporeal
thing, form, or quality, but that all things are to be explained
from the nature of matter and its qualities, especially from their
magnitude, figure, and motion. The physics of Descartes, to which was
especially due the spread of mechanical notions, virtually postulated
the problem: given a homogeneous quantity of matter, endowed only with
extension and mobility, to account for all material phenomena. Leibniz
accepts this mechanical view without reserve.
What has been said suggests the bearing of mathematics in this
connection. Extension and mobility may be treated by mathematics. It is
indeed the business of the geometer to give us an analysis of figured
space, to set before us all possible combinations which can arise,
assuming extension only. The higher analysis sets before us the results
which inevitably follow if we suppose a moving point or any system of
movements. Mathematics is thus the essential tool for treating physical
phenomena as just defined. But it is more. The mechanical explanation
of Nature not only requires such a development of mathematics as will
make it applicable to the interpretation of physical facts, but the
employment of mathematics is necessary for the very discovery of these
facts. Exact observation was the necessity of the growing physical
science; and exact observation means such as will answer the question,
_How much?_ Knowledge of nature depends upon our ability to _measure_
her processes,--that is, to reduce distinctions of quality to those of
quantity. The only assurance that we can finally have that two facts
are connected in such a way as to fulfil the requirements of scientific
research, is that there is a complete quantitative connection between
them, so that one can be regarded as the other transformed. The advance
of physical science from the days of Copernicus to the present has
consisted, therefore, on one hand, in a development of mathematics
which has made it possible to apply it in greater and greater measure
to the discussion and formulation of the results of experiment, and to
deduce laws which, when interpreted physically, will give new knowledge
of fact; and, on the other, to multiply, sharpen, and make precise all
sorts of devices by which the processes of nature may be measured. The
explanation of nature by natural processes; the complete application
of mathematics to nature,--these are the two thoughts which, so far,
we have seen to be fundamental to the development of the philosophy
of Leibniz.
The third factor, and that which brings Leibniz nearer, perhaps, our
own day than either of the others, is the growth of physiological
science. Swammerdam, Malpighi, Leewenhoek,--these are names which
occur and recur in the pages of Leibniz. Indeed, he appears to be the
first of that now long line of modern philosophers to be profoundly
influenced by the conception of life and the categories of organic
growth. Descartes concerned himself indeed with physiological problems,
but it was only with a view to applying mechanical principles. The
idea of the vital unity of all organs of the body might seem to
be attractive to one filled with the notion of the unity of all in
God, and yet Spinoza shows no traces of the influence of the organic
conception. Not until Kant's famous definition of organism do we see
another philosopher moved by an attempt to comprehend the categories of
living structure.
But it is the idea of organism, of life, which is radical to the
thought of Leibniz. I do not think, however, that it can truly be said
that he was led to the idea simply from the state of physiological
investigation at that time. Rather, he had already learned to think of
the world as organic through and through, and found in the results of
biology confirmations, apt illustrations of a truth of which he was
already thoroughly convinced. His writings show that there were two
aspects of biological science which especially interested him. One
was the simple fact of organism itself,--the fact of the various
activities of different organs occurring in complete harmony for one
end. This presented three notions very dear to the mind of Leibniz,
or rather three moments of the same idea,--the factors of activity,
of unity brought about by co-ordinated action, and of an end which
reveals the meaning of the activity and is the ideal expression of
the unity. The physiologists of that day were also occupied with the
problem of growth. The generalization that all is developed _ab ovo_
was just receiving universal attention. The question which thrust
itself upon science for solution was the mode by which ova, apparently
homogeneous in structure, developed into the various forms of the
organic kingdom. The answer given was "evolution." But evolution had
not the meaning which the term has to-day. By evolution was meant
that the whole complex structure of man, for example, was virtually
contained in the germ, and that the apparent phenomenon of growth was
not the addition of anything from without, but simply the unfolding
and magnifying of that already existing. It was the doctrine which
afterwards gave way to the epigenesis theory of Wolff, according to
which growth is not mere unfolding or unwrapping, but progressive
differentiation. The "evolution" theory was the scientific theory of
the times, however, and was warmly espoused by Leibniz. To him, as we
shall see hereafter, it seemed to give a key which would unlock one of
the problems of the universe.
Such, then, were the three chief generalizations which Leibniz found
current, and which most deeply affected him. But what use did he make
of them? He did not become a philosopher by letting them lie dormant in
his mind, nor by surrendering himself passively to them till he could
mechanically apply them everywhere. He was a philosopher only in virtue
of the active attitude which his mind took towards them. He could not
simply accept them at their face-value; he must ask after the source of
their value, the royal stamp of meaning which made them a circulatory
medium. That is to say, he had to interpret these ideas, to see what
they mean, and what is the basis of their validity.
Not many men have been so conscious of just the bearings of their
own ideas and of their source as was he. He often allows us a direct
glimpse into the method of his thinking, and nowhere more than when
he says: "Those who give themselves up to the details of science
usually despise abstract and general researches. Those who go into
universal principles rarely care for particular facts. But I equally
esteem both." Leibniz, in other words, was equally interested in the
application of scientific principles to the explanation of the details
of natural phenomena, and in the bearing and meaning of the principles
themselves,--a rare combination, indeed, but one, which existing,
stamps the genuine philosopher. Leibniz substantially repeats this
idea when he says: "Particular effects must be explained mechanically;
but the general principles of physics and mathematics depend upon
metaphysics." And again: "All occurs mechanically; but the mechanical
principle is not to be explained from material and mathematical
considerations, but it flows from a higher and a metaphysical source."
As a man of science, Leibniz might have stopped short with the
ideas of mechanical law, of the application of mathematics, and of
the continuity of development. As a philosopher he could not. There
are some scientific men to whom it always seems a perversion of their
principles to attempt to carry them any beyond their application to the
details of the subject. They look on in a bewildered and protesting
attitude when there is suggested the necessity of any further
inquiry. Or perhaps they dogmatically deny the possibility of any such
investigation, and as dogmatically assume the sufficiency of their
principles for the decision of all possible problems. But bewildered
fear and dogmatic assertion are equally impotent to fix arbitrary
limits to human thought. Wherever there is a subject that has meaning,
there is a field which appeals to mind, and the mind will not cease
its endeavors till it has made out what that meaning is, and has made
it out in its entirety. So the three principles already spoken of were
but the starting-points, the stepping-stones of Leibniz's philosophic
thought. While to physical science they are solutions, to philosophy
they are problems; and as such Leibniz recognized them. What solution
did he give?
So far as the principle of mechanical explanation is concerned,
the clew is given by considering the factor upon which he laid
most emphasis, namely, motion. Descartes had said that the essence
of the physical world is extension. "Not so," replied Leibniz;
"It is motion." These answers mark two typical ways of regarding
nature. According to one, nature is something essentially rigid
and static; whatever change in it occurs, is a change of form,
of arrangement, an external modification. According to the other,
nature is something essentially dynamic and active. Change according
to law is its very essence. Form, arrangement are only the results
of this internal principle. And so to Leibniz, extension and the
spatial aspects of physical existence were only secondary, they were
phenomenal. The primary, the real fact was motion.
The considerations which led him to this conclusion are simple
enough. It is the fact already mentioned, that explanation always
consists in reducing phenomena to a law of motion which connects
them. Descartes himself had not succeeded in writing his physics
without everywhere using the conception of motion. But motion cannot
be got out of the idea of extension. Geometry will not give us
activity. What is this, except virtually to admit the insufficiency
of purely statical conceptions? Leibniz found himself confirmed in
this position by the fact that the more logical of the followers
of Descartes had recognized that motion is a superfluous intruder,
if extension be indeed the essence of matter, and therefore had been
obliged to have recourse to the immediate activity of God as the cause
of all changes. But this, as Leibniz said, was simply to give up the
very idea of mechanical explanation, and to fall back into the purely
general explanations of scholasticism.
This is not the place for a detailed exposition of the ideas of Leibniz
regarding matter, motion, and extension. We need here only recognize
that he saw in motion the final reality of the physical universe. But
what about motion? To many, perhaps the majority, of minds to-day it
seems useless or absurd, or both, to ask any question about motion. It
is simply an ultimate _fact_, to which all other facts are to be
reduced. We are so familiar with it as a solution of all physical
problems that we are confused, and fail to recognize it when it appears
in the guise of a problem. But, I repeat, philosophy cannot stop with
facts, however ultimate. It must also know something about the meaning,
the significance, in short the ideal bearing, of facts. From the point
of view of philosophy, motion has a certain function in the economy of
the universe; it is, as Aristotle saw, something ideal.
The name of Aristotle suggests the principles which guided Leibniz
in his interpretation of the fact of motion. The thought of Aristotle
moves about the two poles of potentiality and actuality. Potentiality
is not _mere_ capacity; it is being in an undeveloped, imperfect
stage. Actuality is, as the word suggests, activity. Anything is
potential in so far as it does not manifest itself in action; it is
actual so far as it does thus show forth its being. Now, movement, or
change in its most general sense, is that by which the potential comes
to the realization of its nature, and functions as an activity. Motion,
then, is not an ultimate fact, but is subordinate. It exists for an
end. It is that by which existence realizes its idea; that is, its
proper type of action.
Now Leibniz does not formally build upon these distinctions; and
yet he is not very far removed from Aristotle. Motion, he is never
weary of repeating, means force, means energy, means activity. To
say that the essence of nature is motion, is to say that the natural
world finally introduces us to the supremacy of action. Reality is
activity. _Substance c'est l'action._ That is the key-note and the
battle-cry of the Leibnizian philosophy. Motion is that by which being
expresses its nature, fulfils its purpose, reveals its idea. In short,
the specific scientific conception of motion is by Leibniz transformed
into the philosophic conception of force, of activity. In motion he
sees evidence of the fact that the universe is radically dynamic.
In the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of nature
Leibniz finds witness to the continuity and order of the world. We
have become so accustomed to the fact that mathematics may be directly
employed for the discussion and formulation of physical investigations
that we forget what is implied in it. It involves the huge assumption
that the world answers to reason; so that whatever the mind finds to be
ideally true may be taken for granted to be physically true also. But
in those days, when the correlation of the laws of the world and the
laws of mathematical reasoning was a fresh discovery, this aspect of
the case could not be easily lost sight of.
In fact it was this correlation which filled the _Zeitgeist_ of
the sixteenth century with the idea that it had a new organ for the
penetration of nature, a new sense for learning its meaning. Descartes
gives the following as the origin of his philosophy: "The long chains
of simple and easy reasons which geometers employ, even in their
most complex demonstrations, made me fancy that all things which are
the objects of human knowledge are _similarly interdependent_." To
Leibniz also mathematics seemed to give a clew to the order, the
interdependence, the harmonious relations, of the world.
In this respect the feeling of Plato that God geometrizes found
an echoing response in Leibniz. But the latter would hardly have
expressed it in the same way. He would have preferred to say that God
everywhere uses the infinitesimal calculus. In the applicability of the
calculus to the discussion of physical facts, Leibniz saw two truths
reflected,--that everything that occurs has its reason, its dependent
connection upon something else, and that all is continuous and without
breaks. While the formal principles of his logic are those of identity
and contradiction, his real principles are those of sufficient reason
and of continuity. Nature never makes leaps; everything in nature has
a sufficient reason why it is as it is: these are the philosophic
generalizations which Leibniz finds hidden in the applicability
of mathematics to physical science. Reason finds itself everywhere
expressed in nature; and the law of reason is unity in diversity,
continuity.
Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of
mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character
of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be
understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions
are fundamentally mathematical laws,--laws of reason. Hence force,
activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature
is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean
Intelligence. Furthermore, as the fundamental law of intelligence is
the production of difference in unity, the primary law of physical
change must be the manifestation of this unity in difference,--or,
as Leibniz interpreted it, continuity. In nature there are no breaks,
neither of quantity nor of quality nor of relationship. The full force
of this law we shall see later.
Such an idea can hardly be distinguished from the idea of growth or
development; one passes naturally into the other. Thus it is equally
proper to say that the third scientific influence, the conception of
organism and growth, is dominant in the Leibnizian thought, or that
this is swallowed up and absorbed in the grand idea of continuity. The
law of animal and vegetable life and the law of the universe are
identified. The substance of the universe is activity; the law of
the universe is interdependence. What is this but to say that the
universe is an organic whole? Its activity is the manifestation of
life,--nay, it is life. The laws of its activity reveal that continuity
of development, that harmony of inter-relation, which are everywhere
the marks of life. The final and fundamental notion, therefore, by
which Leibniz interprets the laws of physics and mathematics is that of
Life. This is his regnant category. It is "that higher and metaphysical
source" from which the very existence and principles of mechanism
flow. The perpetual and ubiquitous presence of motion reveals the
pulsations of Life; the correlation, the rationality, of these motions
indicate the guiding presence of Life. This idea is the alpha and omega
of his philosophy.
CHAPTER III.
THE PROBLEM, AND ITS SOLUTION.
Leibniz, like every great man, absorbed into himself the various
thoughts of his time, and in absorbing transformed them. He brought
into a focus of brilliancy the diffused lights of truth shining here
and there. He summed up in a pregnant and comprehensive category
the scattered principles of his age. Yet we are not to suppose that
Leibniz considered these various ideas one by one, and then patched
them into an artificial unity of thought. Philosophies are not
manufactured piecemeal out of isolated and fragmentary thoughts; they
grow from a single root, absorbing from their environment whatever
of sustenance offers itself, and maturing in one splendid fruit of
spiritual truth. It is convenient, indeed, to isolate various phases
of truth, and consider them as distinct forces working to shape one
final product, and as a convenient artifice it is legitimate. But it
answers to no process actually occurring. Leibniz never surrendered
his personal unity, and out of some one root-conception grew all his
ideas. The principles of his times were not separate forces acting upon
him, they were the foods of which he selected and assimilated such as
were fitted to nourish his one great conception.
But it is more than a personal unity which holds together the thinking
of a philosopher. There is the unity of the problem, which the
philosopher has always before him, and in which all particular ideas
find their unity. All else issues from this and merges into it. The
various influences which we have seen affecting Leibniz, therefore,
got their effectiveness from the relation which he saw them bear to the
final problem of all thought. This is the inquiry after the unity of
experience, if we look at it from the side of the subject; the unity
of reality, if we put it from the objective side. Yet each age states
this problem in its own way, because it sees it in the light of some
difficulty which has recently arisen in consciousness. At one time,
the question is as to the relation of the one to the many; at another,
of the relation of the sensible to the intelligible world; at another,
of the relation of the individual to the universal. And this last
seems to have been the way in which it specifically presented itself
to Leibniz. This way of stating it was developed, though apparently
without adequate realization of its meaning, by the philosophy
of scholasticism. It stated the problem as primarily a logical
question,--the relation of genera, of species, of individuals to each
other. And the school-boy, made after the stamp of literary tradition,
knows that there were two parties among the Schoolmen,--the Realists,
and the Nominalists; one asserting, the other denying, the objective
reality of universals. To regard this discussion as useless, is to
utter the condemnation of philosophy, and to relegate the foundation
of science to the realm of things not to be inquired into. To say that
it is an easy matter to decide, is to assume the decision with equal
ease of all the problems that have vexed the thought of humanity. To
us it seems easy because we have bodily incorporated into our thinking
the results of both the realistic and the nominalistic doctrines,
without attempting to reconcile them, or even being conscious of
the necessity of reconciliation. We assert in one breath that the
individual is alone real, and in the next assert that only those forms
of consciousness which represent something in the universe are to be
termed knowledge. At one moment we say that universals are creations of
the individual mind, and at the next pass on to talk of laws of nature,
or even of a reign of law. In other words, we have learned to regard
both the individual and the universal as real, and thus ignoring the
problem, think we have solved it.
But to Leibniz the problem presented itself neither as a logical
question, nor yet as one whose solution might be taken for granted. On
the contrary, it was just this question: How shall we conceive the
individual to be related to the universe? which seemed to him to be the
nerve of the philosophic problem, the question whose right answer would
solve the problems of religion, of morals, of the basis of science,
as well as of the nature of reality. The importance of just this way
of putting the question had been rendered evident by the predecessors
and contemporaries of Leibniz, especially by Descartes, Spinoza, and
Locke. His more specific relations to the last-named will occupy us
hereafter; at present we must notice how the question stood at the
hands of Descartes and Spinoza.
Descartes had separated the individual from the universal. His
philosophy began and ended with a dualism. I have just said that the
problem of philosophy is the unity of experience. Yet we find that
there have been thinkers, and those of the first rank, who have left
the matter without discovering any ultimate unity, or rather who have
made it the burden of their contention that we cannot explain the world
without at least two disparate principles. But if we continue to look
at the matter in this historical way, we shall see that this dualism
has always been treated by the successors of such a philosopher, not
as a solution, but as a deeper statement of the problem. It is the
function of dualistic philosophies to re-state the question in a new
and more significant way. There are times when the accepted unity of
thought is seen to be inadequate and superficial. Men are thrashing old
straw, and paying themselves with ideas which have lost their freshness
and their timeliness. There then arises a philosopher who goes deep,
beyond the superficial unity, and who discovers the untouched
problem. His it is to assert the true meaning of the question,
which has been unseen or evaded. The attitude of dualism is thus
always necessary, but never final. Its value is not in any solution,
but in the generality and depth of the problem which it proposes, and
which incites thought to the discovery of a unity of equal depth and
comprehensiveness.
Except for Descartes, then, we should not be conscious of the gulf
that yawns between the individual mind and the universe in front of
it. He presented the opposition as between mind and matter. The essence
of the former is thought; of the latter, extension. The conceptions
are disparate and opposed. No interaction is possible. His disciples,
more consistent than their master, called in a _deus ex machina_,--the
miraculous intervention of God,--in order to account for the appearance
of reciprocal action between the universe of matter and the thinking
individual. Thus they in substance admitted the relation between
them to be scientifically inexplicable, and had recourse to the
supernatural. The individual does not act upon the universe to produce,
destroy, or alter the arrangement of anything. But upon the _occasion_
of his volition God produces a corresponding material change. The world
does not act upon the soul of the individual to produce thoughts or
sensations. God, upon _occasion_ of the external affection, brings
them into being. With such thoroughness Descartes performed his task
of separation. Yet the introduction of the _deus ex machina_ only
complicated the problem; it introduced a third factor where two were
already too many. What is the relation of God to Mind and to Matter? Is
it simply a third somewhat, equally distinct from both, or does it
contain both within itself?
Spinoza attempted to solve the problem in the latter sense. He
conceived God to be the one substance of the universe, possessing the
two known attributes of thought and matter. These attributes are one
in God; indeed, he is their unity. This is the sole legitimate outcome
of the Cartesian problem stated as Descartes would have it stated. It
overcomes the absoluteness of the dualism by discovering a common and
fundamental unity, and at the same time takes the subject out of the
realm of the miraculous. For the solution works both ways. It affects
the nature of God, as well as of extension and thought. It presents
him to us, not as a supernatural being, but as the unity of thought and
extension. In knowing these as they are, we know God as he is. Spinoza,
in other words, uses the conception of God in a different way from
the Cartesians. The latter had treated him as the God of theology,--a
being supernatural; Spinoza uses the conception as a scientific one,
and speaks of _Deus sive Natura_.
Leibniz recognized the unphilosophic character of the recourse to a
_deus ex machina_ as clearly as Spinoza, and yet did not accept his
solution. To find out why he did not is the problem of the historian
of thought. The one cause which stands out above all others is that in
the unity of Spinoza all difference, all distinction, is lost. All
particular existences, whether things or persons, are _modes_
of extension and thought. Their _apparent_ existence is due to the
imagination, which is the source of belief in particular things. When
considered as they really are,--that is, by the understanding,--they
vanish. The one substance, with its two unchanging attributes of
thought and extension, alone remains. If it is a philosophic error
to give a solution which permits of no unity, is it not equally a
philosophic error to give one which denies difference? So it seemed
to Leibniz. The problem is to reconcile difference in unity, not to
swallow up difference in a blank oneness,--to reconcile the individual
with the universe, not to absorb him.
The unsatisfactoriness of the solution appears if we look at it from
another side. Difference implies change, while a unity in which all
variety is lost implies quiescence. Change is as much an illusion of
imagination to Spinoza as is variety. The One Reality is permanent. How
repugnant the conception of a static universe was to Leibniz we have
already learned. Spinoza fails to satisfy Leibniz, therefore, because
he does not allow the conceptions of individuality and of activity. He
presents a unity in which all distinction of individuals is lost,
and in which there is no room for change. But Spinoza certainly
presented the problem more clearly to Leibniz, and revealed more
definitely the conditions of its solution. The search is henceforth
for a unity which shall avoid the irresolvable dualism of Descartes,
and yet shall allow free play to the principles of individuality and of
activity. There must be, in short, a universe to which the individual
bears a real yet independent relation. What is this unity? The answer,
in the phraseology of Leibniz, is the _monad_. Spinoza would be right,
said Leibniz, were it not for the existence of monads. I know there are
some who have done Leibniz the honor of supposing that this is his way
of saying, "Spinoza is wrong because I am right;" but I cannot help
thinking that the saying has a somewhat deeper meaning. What, then,
is the nature of the monad? The answer to this question takes us back
to the point where the discussion of the question was left at the end
of chapter second. The nature of the monad is life. The monad is the
spiritual activity which lives in absolute harmony with an infinite
number of other monads.
Let us first consider the reasons of Leibniz for conceiving the
principle of unity as spiritual. Primarily it is because it is
impossible to conceive of a unity which is material. In the sensible
world there is no unity. There are, indeed, aggregations, collections,
which seem like unities; but the very fact that these are aggregations
shows that the unity is factitious. It is the very nature of matter to
be infinitely divisible: to say this is to deny the existence of any
true principle of unity. The world of nature is the world of space
and time; and where in space or time shall we find a unity where we
may rest? Every point in space, every moment in time, points beyond
itself. It refers to a totality of which it is but a part, or, rather,
a limitation. If we add resistance, we are not better situated. We
have to think of something which resists; and to this something we must
attribute extension,--that is to say, difference, plurality. Nor can we
find any resistance which is absolute and final. There may be a body
which is undivided, and which resists all energy now acting upon it;
but we cannot frame an intelligible idea of a body which is absolutely
indivisible. To do so is to think of a body out of all relation to
existing forces, something absolutely isolated; while the forces of
nature are always relative to one another. That which resists does so
in comparison with some opposing energy. The absolutely indivisible,
on the other hand, would be that which could not be brought into
comparison with other forces; it would not have any of the attributes
of force as we know it. In a word, whatever exists in nature is
relative in space, in time, and in qualities to all else. It is made
what it is by virtue of the totality of its relations to the universe;
it has no ultimate principle of self-subsistent unity in it.
Nor do we fare better if we attempt to find unity in the world of
nature as a whole. Nature has its existence as a whole in space and
time. Indeed, it is only a way of expressing the totality of phenomena
of space and time. It is a mere aggregate, a collection. Its very
essence is plurality, difference. It is divisible without limit,
and each of its divisions has as good a right to be called one as
the whole from which it is broken off. We shall consider hereafter
Leibniz's idea of infinity; but it is easy to see that he must deny
any true infinity to nature. An ultimate whole made up of parts is a
contradictory conception; and the idea of a quantitative infinite is
equally so. Quantity means number, measure, limitation. We may not
be able to assign number to the totality of occurrences in nature,
nor to measure her every event. This shows that nature is indefinitely
greater than any _assignable_ quantity; but it does not remove her from
the category of quantity. As long as the world is conceived as that
existing in space and time, it is conceived as that which has to be
measured. As we saw in the last chapter, the heart of the mechanical
theory of the world is in the application of mathematics to it. Since
quantity and mathematics are correlative terms, the natural world
cannot be conceived as infinite or as an ultimate unity.
In short, Leibniz urges and suggests in one form and another those
objections to the mechanical theory of reality which later German
philosophers have made us so familiar with. The objections are indeed
varied in statement, but they all come to the impossibility of finding
any unity, any wholeness, anything except plurality and partiality in
that which is externally conditioned,--as everything is in nature.
But the reasons as thus stated are rather negative than positive. They
show why the ultimate unity cannot be conceived as material, rather
than why it must be conceived as spiritual. The immediate evidence
of its spiritual nature Leibniz finds in the perception of the one
unity directly known to us,--the "me," the conscious principle within,
which reveals itself as an active force, and as truly one, since not a
spatial or temporal existence. And this evidence he finds confirmed by
the fact that whatever unity material phenomena appear to have comes to
them through their perception by the soul. Whatever the mind grasps in
one act, is manifested as one.
But it is not in any immediate certainty of fact that Leibniz finds
the best or completest demonstration of the spiritual nature of the
ultimate unity. This is found in the use which can be made of the
hypothesis. The truest witness to the spiritual character of reality
is found in the capacity of this principle to comprehend and explain
the facts of experience. With this conception the reason of things
can be ascertained, and light introduced into what were otherwise a
confused obscurity. And, indeed, this is the only sufficient proof of
any doctrine. It is not what comes before the formulation of a theory
which proves it; it is not the facts which suggest it, or the processes
which lead up to it: it is what comes after the formation of the
theory,--the uses that it can be put to; the facts which it will render
significant. The whole philosophy of Leibniz in its simplicity, width,
and depth, is the real evidence of the truth of his philosophical
principle.
The monad, then, is a spiritual unity; it is individualized
life. Unity, activity, individuality are synonymous terms in the
vocabulary of Leibniz. Every unity is a true substance, containing
within itself the source and law of its own activity. It is that
which is internally determined to action. It is to be conceived
after the analogy of the soul. It is an indivisible unity, like
"that particular something in us which thinks, apperceives and
wills, and distinguishes us in a way of its own from whatever else
thinks and wills." Against Descartes, therefore, Leibniz stands for
the principle of unity; against Spinoza, he upholds the doctrine
of individuality, of diversity, of multiplicity. And the latter
principle is as important in his thought as the former. Indeed, they
are inseparable. The individual is the true unity. There is an infinite
number of these individuals, each distinct from every other. The law
of specification, of distinction, runs through the universe. Two beings
cannot be alike. They are not individualized merely by their different
positions in space or time; duration and extension, on the contrary,
are, as we have seen, principles of relativity, of connection. Monads
are specified by an internal principle. Their distinct individuality is
constituted by their distinct law of activity. Leibniz will not have
a philosophy of abstract unity, representing the universe as simple
only, he will have a philosophy equal to the diversity, the manifold
wealth of variety, in the universe. This is only to say that he will be
faithful to his fundamental notion,--that of Life. Life does not mean
a simple unity like a mathematical one, it means a unity which is the
harmony of the interplay of diverse organs, each following its own law
and having its own function. When Leibniz says, God willed to have more
monads rather than fewer, the expression is indeed one of _naïveté_,
but the thought is one of unexplored depth. It is the thought that
Leibniz repeats when he says, "Those who would reduce all things to
modifications of one universal substance do not have sufficient regard
to the _order_, the _harmony_ of reality." Leibniz applies here, as
everywhere, the principle of continuity, which is unity in and through
diversity, not the principle of bare oneness. There is a kingdom of
monads, a realm truly infinite, composed of individual unities or
activities in an absolute continuity. Leibniz was one of the first,
if not the first, to use just the expression "uniformity of nature;"
but even here he explains that it means "uniform in variety, one in
principle, but varied in manifestation." The world is to be as rich as
possible. This is simply to say that distinct individuality as well as
ultimate unity is a law of reality.
But has not Leibniz fallen into a perilous position? In avoiding the
monotone of unity which characterizes the thought of Spinoza, has
he not fallen into a lawless variety of multiplicity, infinitely
less philosophic than even the dualism of Descartes, since it has
an infinity of ultimate principles instead of only two? If Spinoza
sacrificed the individual to the universe, has not Leibniz,
in his desire to emphasize the individual, gone to the other
extreme? Apparently we are introduced to a universe that is a mere
aggregate of an infinite multiplicity of realities, each independent
of every other. Such a universe would not be a universe. It would
be a chaos of disorder and conflict. We come, therefore, to a
consideration of the relation between these individual monads and
the universe. We have to discover what lifts the monads out of their
isolation and bestows upon them that stamp of universality which makes
it possible for them to enter into the coherent structure of reality:
in a word, what is the universal content which the monad in its formal
individuality bears and manifests?
The way in which the question has just been stated suggests the
Leibnizian answer. The monad, indeed, in its form is thoroughly
individual, having its own unique mode of activity; but its content,
that which this activity manifests, is not peculiar to it as an
individual, but is the substance or law of the universe. It is the
very nature of the monad to be representative. Its activity consists
in picturing or reproducing those relations which make up the world of
reality. In a conscious soul, the ability thus to represent the world
is called "perception," and thus Leibniz attributes perception to all
the monads. This is not to be understood as a conscious representation
of reality to itself (for this the term "apperception" is reserved),
but it signifies that the very essence of the monad is to produce
states which are not its own peculiar possessions, but which reflect
the facts and relations of the universe. Leibniz never wearies in
finding new ways to express this purely representative character of the
monad. The monads are little souls; they are mirrors of the world; they
are concentrations of the universe, each expressing it in its own way;
borrowing a term from scholasticism, they are "substantial forms." They
are substantial, for they are independent unities; they are forms,
because the term "form" expresses, in Aristotelian phraseology, the
type or law of some class of phenomena. The monad is an individual,
but its whole content, its objectivity or reality, is the summation of
the universe which it represents. It is individual, but whatever marks
it as actual is some reproduction of the world. His reconciliation
of the principles of individuality and universality is contained
in the following words: "Each monad contains within itself an order
corresponding to that of the universe,--indeed, the monads represent
the universe in an infinity of ways, all different, and all true, thus
multiplying the universe as many times as is possible, approaching
the divine as near as may be, and giving the world all the perfection
of which it is capable." The monad is individual, for it represents
reality in its own way, from its own point of view. It is universal,
for its whole content is the order of the universe.
New light is thus thrown upon the former statement that reality
is activity, that the measure of a being is the action which it
puts forth. That statement is purely formal. It leaves the kind
of activity and its law wholly undetermined. But this relation of
"representativeness" which we have discovered gives definiteness. It
is the law of the monad's action to mirror, to reflect, the universe;
its changes follow each other so as to bring about this reflection in
the completest degree possible. The monad is literally the many in the
one; it is the answer to the inquiry of Greek philosophy. The many
are not present by way of participation in some underlying essence,
not yet as statically possessed by the one, as attributes are sometimes
supposed to inhere in a substratum. The "many" is the manifestation of
the activity of the "one." The one and the many are related as form
and content in an organic unity, which is activity. The essence of a
substance, says Leibniz, consists in that regular tendency of action
by which its phenomena follow one another in a certain order; and that
order, as he repeatedly states, is the order in which the universe
itself is arranged.
The activity of a monad may be advantageously compared to that of a
supposed atom, granting, for the sake of the illustration, that there
is such a thing. Each is in a state of change: the atom changes its
place, the monad its representation, and each in the simplest and
most uniform way that its conditions permit. How, then, is there such
a similarity, such a monotony, in the change of an atom, and such
variety and complexity in the change of a monad? It is because the
atom has merely parts, or external variety, while the monad has an
internal variety. Multiplicity is organically wrought into its very
being. It has an _essential_ relation to all things in the universe;
and to say that this relation is essential, is to say that it is one
which constitutes its very content, its being. Hence the cause of the
changes of the monad, of their variety and complexity, is one with the
cause of the richness, the profusion, the regulated variety of change
in the universe itself. While we have employed a comparison with atoms,
this very comparison may serve to show us the impossibility of atoms as
they are generally defined by the physicist turned philosopher. Atoms
have no internal and essential relation to the world; they have no
internal connection with any one thing in the world: and what is this
but to say that they do not enter anywhere into the structure of the
world? By their very conception they are forever aliens, banished from
any share or lot in the realm of reality. The idea which Leibniz never
lets go, the idea which he always accentuates, is, then, the idea of an
individual activity which in its continual change manifests as its own
internal content and reality that reality and those laws of connection
which make up the world itself.
We are thus introduced naturally to the conception which plays so
large a part in the Leibnizian philosophy, that of pre-established
harmony. This term simply names the fact, which we see to be
fundamental with Leibniz,--the fact that, while the form of every
monad is individuality, a unique principle of action, its content
is universal, the very being and laws of the world. For we must
now notice more explicitly what has been wrapped up in the idea all
along. There is no direct influence of monads upon each other. One
cannot affect another causally. There is no actual interaction of one
upon another. Expressed in that figurative language which was ever
natural to Leibniz, the monads have no windows by which anything can
get in or out. This follows, of course, from the mutual independence
and individuality of the monads. They are a true democracy, in
which each citizen has sovereignty. To admit external influences
acting upon them is to surrender their independence, to deny their
sovereignty. But we must remember the other half. This democracy is not
after the Platonic conception of democracy, in which each does as it
pleases, and in which there is neither order nor law, but the extremest
assertion of individuality. What each sovereign citizen of the realm
of reality expresses is precisely law. Each is an embodiment in its own
way of the harmony, the order, of the whole kingdom. Each is sovereign
because it is dynamic law,--law which is no longer abstract, but has
realized itself in life. Thus another way of stating the doctrine of
pre-established harmony is the unity of freedom and necessity. Each
monad is free because it is individual, because it follows the
law of its own activity unhindered, unretarded, by others; it is
self-determined. But it is self-determined to show forth the order, the
harmony, of the universe. There is nothing of caprice, of peculiarity,
in the content of the monad. It shows forth order; it is organized
by law; it reveals the necessary connections which constitute the
universe. The pre-established harmony is the unity of the individual
and the universe; it is the organic oneness of freedom and necessity.
We see still further what it means when we learn that it is by this
conception that Leibniz reconciles the conceptions of physical and
final causation. There is no principle closer to the thought of Leibniz
than that of the equal presence and efficiency everywhere of both
physical and final causes. Every fact which occurs is susceptible
of a mechanical and of a rational explanation. It is necessarily
connected with preceding states, and it has a necessary end which
it is fulfilling. The complete meaning of this principle will meet
us hereafter; at present we must notice that it is one form of the
doctrine of pre-established harmony. All things have an end because
they form parts of one system; everything that occurs looks forward
to something else and prepares the way for it, and yet it is itself
mechanically conditioned by its antecedents. This is only another way
of saying that there is complete harmony between all beings in the
universe; so that each monad in fulfilling the law of its own existence
contributes to the immanent significance of the universe. The monads
are co-ordinated in such a way that they express a common idea. There
is a plan common to all, in which each has its own place. All are
making towards one goal, expressing one purpose. The universe is
an organism; and Leibniz would have applied to it the words which
Milne-Edwards applied to the human organism, as I find them quoted
by Lewes: "In the organism everything seems to be calculated with one
determined result in view; and the harmony of the parts does not result
from the influence which they exert upon one another, but from their
co-ordination under the rule of a common force, a preconceived plan,
a pre-existent force." That is to say, the universe is teleological,
both as a whole and in its parts; for there is a common idea animating
it and expressed by it; it is mechanical, for this idea is realized and
manifested by the outworking of forces.
It ought to be evident even from this imperfect sketch that the
Leibnizian theory of pre-established harmony is not that utterly
artificial and grotesque doctrine which it is sometimes represented
to be. The phrase "pre-established harmony" is, strictly speaking,
tautologous. The term "pre-established" is superfluous. It means
"existent." There is no real harmony which is not existent or
pre-established. An accidental harmony is a contradiction in terms. It
means a chaotic cosmos, an unordered order, a lawless law, or whatever
else is nonsensical.
Harmony, in short, means relation, means connection, means
subordination and co-ordination, means adjustment, means a variety,
which yet is one. The Leibnizian doctrine is not a factitious product
of his imagination, nor is it a mechanical scheme for reconciling a
problem which has no existence outside of the bewildered brains of
philosophers. It is an expression of the fact that the universe is
one of order, of continuity, of unity; it is the accentuating of this
doctrine so that the very essence of reality is found in this ordered
combination; it is the special application of this principle to the
solution of many of the problems which "the mind of man is apt to
run into,"--the questions of the relation of the individual and the
universal, of freedom and necessity, of the physical and material,
of the teleological and mechanical. We may not be contented with the
doctrine as he presents it, we may think it to be rather a summary
and highly concentrated statement of the problem than its solution,
or we may object to details in the carrying out of the doctrine. But
we cannot deny that it is a genuine attempt to meet a genuine problem,
and that it contains some, if not all, of the factors required for
its adequate solution. To Leibniz must remain the glory of being the
thinker to seize upon the perfect unity and order of the universe as
its essential characteristic, and of arranging his thoughts with a view
to discovering and expressing it.
We have but to notice one point more, and our task is done so far as
it serves to make plain the standpoint from which Leibniz criticised
Locke. There is, we have seen, the greatest possible continuity and
complexity in the realm of monads. There is no break, quantitative nor
qualitative. It follows that the human soul has no gulf set between it
and what we call nature. It is only the highest, that is to say the
most active and the most representative, of all monads. It stands,
indeed, at the head of the scale, but not outside it. From the monad
which reveals its presence in that stone which with blinded eyes we
call dead, through that which acts in the plant, in the animal, up
to that of man, there is no chasm, no interruption. Nay, man himself
is but one link in the chain of spiritual beings which ends only in
God. All monads are souls; the soul of man is a monad which represents
the universe more distinctly and adequately. The law which is enfolded
in the lower monads is developed in it and forms a part of its
conscious activity. The universe, which is confusedly mirrored by the
perception of the lower monad, is clearly brought out in the conscious
apperception of man. The stone is representative of the whole world. An
all-knowing intelligence might read in it relations to every other
fact the world, might see exemplified the past history of the world,
and prefigured the events to come. For the stone is not an isolated
existence, it is an inter-organic member of a system. Change the
slightest fact in the world, and in some way it is affected. The law
of the universe is one of completed reciprocity, and this law must be
mirrored in every existence of the universe. Increase the activity, the
representative power, until it becomes turned back, as it were, upon
itself, until the monad not only is a mirror, but knows itself as one,
and you have man. The soul of man is the world come to consciousness
of itself. The realm of monads in what we call the inorganic world
and the lower organic realm shows us the monad let and hindered in
its development. These realms attempt to speak forth the law of their
being, and reveal the immanent presence of the universe; but they do
not hear their own voice, their utterance is only for others. In man
the universe is manifested, and is manifested to man himself.
CHAPTER IV.
LOCKE AND LEIBNIZ.--INNATE IDEAS.
The reader, impatient of what may have seemed an over-long
introduction, has perhaps been asking when he was to be brought to the
subject under consideration,--the relations of Leibniz to Locke. But
it has been impossible to come to this question until we had formed for
ourselves an outline of the philosophical position of Leibniz. Nowhere
in the "Nouveaux Essais" does Leibniz give a connected and detailed
exposition of his philosophy, either as to his standpoint, his
fundamental principles, or his method.
Some preliminary view of his position is therefore a necessity. The
demand for this preliminary exposition becomes more urgent as we
recognize that Leibniz's remarks upon Locke are not a critique of Locke
from the standpoint of the latter, but are the application of his own
philosophical conclusions. Criticism from within, an examination of
a system of thought with relation to the consistency and coherency
of its results, the connection between these results and the method
professedly employed, investigation which depends not at all upon the
position of the critic, but occupies itself with the internal relations
of the system under discussion,--such criticism is a product of the
present century. What we find in the "Nouveaux Essais" is a comparison
of the ideas of Locke with those of Leibniz himself, a testing of the
former by the latter as a standard, their acceptance when they conform,
their rejection when they are opposed, their completion when they are
in partial harmony.
The value of this sort of criticism is likely to be small and
evanescent. If the system used as a standard is meagre and narrow,
if it is without comprehensiveness and flexibility, it does not repay
after-examination. The fact that the "Nouveaux Essais" of Leibniz
have escaped the oblivion of the philosophical criticism of his day is
proof, if proof still be needed, of the reasoned basis, the width of
grasp, the fertility of suggestion which characterize the thought of
Leibniz. But the fact that the criticism is, after all, external and
not internal has made necessary the foregoing extended account of his
method and general results.
On the other hand, what of Locke? How about him who is the recipient
of the criticism? I assume that no extended account of his ideas
is here necessary, and conceive myself to be justified in this
assumption by the fact that we are already better acquainted with
Locke. This acquaintance, indeed, is not confined to those who have
expressly studied Locke. His thought is an inheritance into which
every English-speaking person at least is born. Only he who does not
think escapes this inheritance. Locke did the work which he had to do
so thoroughly that every Englishman who will philosophize must either
build upon Locke's foundations, or, with conscious purpose, clear the
ground before building for himself. And it would be difficult to say
that the acceptance of Locke's views would influence one's thought
more than their rejection. This must not, of course, be taken too
literally. It may be that one who is a lineal descendant of Locke in
the spiritual generations of thought would not state a single important
truth as Locke stated it, or that those who seek their method and
results elsewhere have not repudiated the thought of Locke as expressly
belonging to him.
But the fundamental principles of empiricism: its conception of
intelligence as an individual possession; its idea of reality as
something over against and distinct from mind; its explanation of
knowledge as a process of action and reaction between these separate
things; its account of our inability to know things as they really
are,--these principles are congenital with our thinking. They are so
natural that we either accept them as axiomatic, and accuse those who
reject them of metaphysical subtlety, or, staggered perchance by some
of their results, give them up with an effort. But it is an effort, and
a severe one; and there is none of us who can tell when some remnant
of the conception of intelligence as purely particular and finite
will catch him tripping. On the other hand, we realize much better
than those who have behind them a Leibniz and a Kant, rather than a
Locke and a Hume, the meaning and the thorough-going necessity of the
universality of intelligence. Idealism must be in some ways arbitrary
and superficial to him who has not had a pretty complete course of
empiricism.
Leibniz seems to have been impressed with the Essay on the Human
Understanding at its first appearance. As early as 1696 we find
him writing a few pages of comment upon the book. Compared with his
later critique, these early "reflections" seem colorless, and give the
impression that Leibniz desired to minimize his differences from Locke
rather than to set them forth in relief. Comparatively slight as were
his expressions of dissent, they appear to have stung Locke when they
reached him. Meantime Locke's book was translated into French, and made
its way to a wider circle of readers. This seems to have suggested to
Leibniz the advisability of pursuing his comments somewhat further;
and in the summer of 1703 he produced the work which now occupies us. A
letter which Leibniz wrote at about this time is worth quoting at large
for the light which it throws upon the man, as well as for suggesting
the chief points in which he differed from Locke. Leibniz writes:--
"I have forgotten to tell you that my comments upon the work of Locke
are nearly done. As he has spoken in a chapter of his second book about
freedom, he has given me an opportunity to discuss that; and I hope
that I may have done it in such a way as will please you. Above all,
I have laid it upon myself to save the immateriality of the soul, which
Locke leaves doubtful. I justify also the existence of innate ideas,
and show that the soul produces their perception out of itself. Axioms,
too, I approve, while Locke has a low opinion of them. In contradiction
to him, I show that the individuality of man, through which he
preserves his identity, consists in the duration of the simple or
immaterial substance which animates him; that the soul is never without
representations; that there is neither a vacuum nor atoms; that matter,
or the passive principle, cannot be conscious, excepting as God unites
with it a conscious substance. We disagree, indeed, in numerous other
points, for I find that he rates too low the noble philosophy of the
Platonic school (as Descartes did in part), and substitutes opinions
which degrade us, and which may become hurtful to morals, though I am
persuaded that Locke's intention was thoroughly good. I have made these
comments in leisure hours, when I have been journeying or visiting, and
could not occupy myself with investigations requiring great pains. The
work has continued to grow under my hands, for in almost every chapter,
and to a greater extent than I had thought possible, I have found
matter for remark. You will be astonished when I tell you that I have
worked upon this as upon something which requires no great pains. But
the fact is, that I long ago established the general principles of
philosophic subjects in my mind in a demonstrative way, or pretty
nearly so, and that they do not require much new consideration from
me."
Leibniz goes on to add that he has put these reflections in the form of
a dialogue that they may be more attractive; has written them in the
popular language, rather than in Latin, that they may reach as wide a
circle as the work of Locke; and that he hopes to publish them soon,
as Locke is already an old man, and he wishes to get them before the
public while Locke may still reply.
But unfortunately this last hope was destined to remain
unrealized. Before the work of revision was accomplished, Locke
died. Leibniz, in a letter written in 1714, alludes to his controversy
with Locke as follows: "I do not like the thought of publishing
refutations of authors who are dead. These should appear during their
life, and be communicated to them." Then, referring to his earlier
comments, he says: "A few remarks escaped me, I hardly know how, and
were taken to England. Mr. Locke, having seen them, spoke of them
slightingly in a letter to Molineux. I am not astonished at it. We
were somewhat too far apart in principle, and that which I suggested
seemed paradoxical to him." Leibniz, according to his conviction here
expressed, never published his "Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement
Humain." Schaarschmidt remarks that another reason may have restrained
him, in that he did not wish to carry on too many controversies at once
with the English people. He had two on his hands then,--one with the
Newtonians regarding the infinitesimal calculus; the other with Bishop
Clarke regarding the nature of God, of time and space, of freedom, and
cognate subjects. However, in 1765, almost fifty years after the death
of Leibniz, his critique upon Locke finally appeared.
It is somewhat significant that one whose tendency was conciliatory,
who was eminently what the Germans delight to call him, a "mediator,"
attempting to unite the varied truths which he found scattered in
opposed systems, should have had so much of his work called forth
by controversy. Aside from the cases just mentioned, his other
chief work, the Theodicy, is, in form, a reply to Bayle. Many of
his minor pieces are replies to criticism or are developments of
his own thought with critical reference to Descartes, Malebranche,
and others. But Leibniz has a somewhat different attitude towards
his British and towards his Continental opponents. With the latter
he was always in sympathy, while they in turn gave whatever he
uttered a respectful hearing. Their mutual critiques begin and end
in compliments. But the Englishmen found the thought of Leibniz
"paradoxical" and forced. It seemed to them wildly speculative,
and indeed arbitrary guess-work, without any special reason for its
production, and wholly unverifiable in its results. Such has been the
fate of much of the best German thought since that time in the land of
the descendants of Newton and Locke. But Leibniz, on the other hand,
felt as if he were dealing, in philosophical matters at least, with
foemen hardly worthy of his steel. Locke, he says, had subtlety and
address, and a sort of _superficial_ metaphysics; but he was ignorant
of the method of mathematics,--that is to say, from the standpoint of
Leibniz, of the method of all science. We have already seen that he
thought the examination of a work which had been the result of the
continued labor of Locke was a matter for the leisure hours of his
courtly visits. Indeed, he would undoubtedly have felt about it what
he actually expressed regarding his controversy with Clarke,--that he
engaged in it
"Ludus et jocus, quia in philosophia
Omnia percepi atque animo mecum ante peregi."
He regarded the English as superficial and without grasp of principles,
as they thought him over-deep and over-theoretical.
From this knowledge of the external circumstances of the work of
Leibniz and its relation to Locke, it is necessary that we turn to
its internal content, to the thought of Leibniz as related to the
ideas of Locke. The Essay on the Human Understanding is, as the name
implies, an account of the nature of knowledge. Locke tells us that
it originated in the fact that often, when he had been engaged in
discussions with his friends, they found themselves landed in insoluble
difficulties. This occurred so frequently that it seemed probable that
they had been going at matters from the wrong side, and that before
they attempted to come to conclusions about questions they ought to
examine the capacity of intelligence, and see whether it is fitted to
deal with such questions. Locke, in a word, is another evidence of that
truth which lies at the basis of all forms of philosophical thought,
however opposed they may be to one another,--the truth that knowledge
and reality are so organic to each other that to come to any conclusion
about one, we must know something about the other. Reality equals
objects known or knowable, and knowledge equals reality dissolved in
ideas,--reality which has become translucent through its meaning.
Locke's Essay is, then, an account of the origin, nature, extent, and
limitations of human knowledge. Such is its subject-matter. What is
its method? Locke himself tells us that he uses the "plain historical
method." We do not have to resort to the forcing of language to learn
that this word "historical" contains the key to his work. Every page
of the Essay is testimony to the fact that Locke always proceeds
by inquiring into the way and circumstances by which knowledge of
the subject under consideration came into existence and into the
conditions by which it was developed. Origin means with Locke, not
logical dependence, but temporal production; development means temporal
succession. In the language of our day, Locke's Essay is an attempt to
settle ontological questions by a psychological method. And as we have
before noticed, Leibniz meets him, not by inquiry into the pertinence
of the method or into the validity of results so reached, but by the
more direct way of impugning his psychology, by substituting another
theory of the nature of mind and of the way in which it works.
The questions with which the discussion begins are as to the existence
of innate ideas, and as to whether the soul always thinks,--questions
which upon their face will lead the experienced reader of to-day to
heave a sigh in memory of hours wasted in barren dispute, and which
will create a desire to turn elsewhere for matter more solid and
more nutritive. But in this case, under the form which the discussion
takes at the hands of Leibniz, the question which awaits answer under
the meagre and worn-out formula of "innate ideas" is the function of
intelligence in experience.
Locke denies, and denies with great vigor, the existence of innate
ideas. His motives in so doing are practical and theoretical. He
sees almost every old idea, every hereditary prejudice, every vested
interest of thought, defended on the ground that it is an innate
idea. Innate ideas were sacred, and everything which could find no
defence before reason was an innate idea. Under such circumstances
he takes as much interest in demolishing them as Bacon took in
the destruction of the "eidols." But this is but a small portion
of the object of Locke. He is a thorough-going empiricist; and the
doctrine of innate ideas appears to offer the greatest obstacle to the
acceptance of the truth that all the furnishing of the intellect comes
from experience. Locke's metaphors for the mind are that it is a blank
tablet, an empty closet, an unwritten book. The "innate idea" is only a
sentence written by experience, but which, deified by a certain school
of philosophers, has come to be regarded as eternally imprinted upon
the soul.
Such, indeed, is Locke's understanding of the nature of innate
ideas. He conceives of them as "characters _stamped_, as it were,
upon the mind of man, which the soul has received in its first being
and brings into the world with it;" or they are "constant _impressions_
which the souls of men receive in their first beings." They are "truths
_imprinted_ upon the soul." Having this conception of what is meant by
"innate ideas," Locke sets himself with great vigor, and, it must be
confessed, with equal success, to their annihilation.
His argument is somewhat diffuse and scattered, but in substance it
is as follows: Whatever is in the mind, the mind must be conscious
of. "To be in the mind and not to be perceived, is all one as to say
that anything is and is not in the mind." If there be anything in the
mind which is innate, it must be present to the consciousness of all,
and, it would seem, of all at all times, savages, infants, and idiots
included. And as it requires little philosophical penetration to
see that savages do not ponder upon the principle that whatever is,
is; that infants do not dwell in their cradle upon the thought of
contradiction, or idiots ruminate upon that of excluded middle,--it
ought to be evident that such truths cannot be innate. Indeed, we must
admit, with Locke, that probably few men ever come to the explicit
consciousness of such ideas, and that these few are such as direct
their minds to the matter with some pains. Locke's argument may be
summed up in his words: If these are not notions naturally imprinted,
how can they be innate? And if they are notions naturally imprinted,
how can they be unknown?
But since it may be said that these truths are in the mind, but in such
a way that it is only when they are proposed that men assent to them,
Locke goes on to clinch his argument. If this be true, it shows that
the ideas are not innate; for the same thing is true of a large number
of scientific truths, those of mathematics and morals, as well as of
purely sensible facts, as that red is not blue, sweet is not sour,
etc.,--truths and facts which no one calls innate. Or if it be said
that they are in the mind implicitly or potentially, Locke points
out that this means either nothing at all, or else that the mind is
_capable_ of knowing them. If this is what is meant by innate ideas,
then all ideas are innate; for certainly it cannot be denied that the
mind is capable of knowing all that it ever does know, or, as Locke
ingenuously remarks, "nobody ever denied that the mind was capable of
knowing several truths."
It is evident that the force of Locke's contention against innate
ideas rests upon a certain theory regarding the nature of innate ideas
and of the relations of consciousness to intelligence. Besides this,
there runs through his whole polemic the assertion that, after all,
innate ideas are useless, as experience, in the sense of impressions
received from without, and the formal action of intelligence upon
them, is adequate to doing all they are supposed to do. It is hardly
too much to say that the nerve of Locke's argument is rather in this
positive assertion than in the negations which he brings against
this existence. Leibniz takes issue with him on each of these three
points. He has another conception of the very nature of innate ideas;
he denies Locke's opinions about consciousness; he brings forward
an opposed theory upon the relation of experience to reason. This
last point we shall take up in a chapter by itself, as its importance
extends far beyond the mere question as to the existence of ideas which
may properly be called innate. The other two questions, as to the real
character of innate ideas and the relation of an idea to consciousness,
afford material to occupy us for the present.
The metaphor which Locke constantly uses is the clew to his conception
of innate ideas. They are characters stamped or imprinted upon the
mind, they exist _in_ the mind. The mind would be just what it is,
even if they had no existence. It would not have quite so much "in"
it, but its own nature would not be changed. Innate ideas he conceives
as bearing a purely external relation to mind. They are not organic
to it, nor necessary instruments through which it expresses itself;
they are mechanically impressed upon it. But what the "intellectual"
school had meant by innate ideas was precisely that the relation of
ideas to intelligence is _not_ that of passive holding or containing
on the side of mind, and of impressions or stamps on the side of the
ideas. Locke reads the fundamental category of empiricism--mechanical
relation, or external action--into the nature of innate ideas, and
hence easily infers their absurdity. But the object of the upholders
of innate ideas had been precisely to deny that this category was
applicable to the whole of intelligence. By an innate idea they meant
an assertion of the dynamic relation of intelligence and some of its
ideas. They meant to assert that intelligence has a structure, which
necessarily functions in certain ways. While Locke's highest conception
of an innate idea was that it must be something ready made, dwelling
in the mind prior to experience, Leibniz everywhere asserts that it
is a connection and relation which forms the logical prius and the
psychological basis of experience. He finds no difficulty in admitting
all there is of positive truth in Locke's doctrine; namely, that we are
not conscious of these innate ideas until a period later than that in
which we are conscious of sensible facts, or, in many cases, are not
conscious of them at all. This priority in time of sensible experience
to rational knowledge, however, can become a reason for denying the
"innate" character of the latter only when we suppose that they are two
entirely different orders of fact, one knowledge due to experience,
the other knowledge already formed and existing in the mind prior to
"experience."
Leibniz's conception of the matter is brought out when he says that it
is indeed true that we begin with particular experiences rather than
with general principles, but that the order of nature is the reverse,
for the ground, the basis of the particular truths is in the general;
the former being in reality only instances of the latter. General
principles, he says, enter into _all_ our thoughts, and form their
soul and interconnection. They are as necessary for thought as muscles
and tendons are for walking, although we may not be conscious of their
existence. This side of the teaching of Leibniz consists, accordingly,
in the assertion that "innate" knowledge and knowledge derived from
experience are not two kinds of knowledge, but rather two ways of
considering it. If we consider it as it comes to us, piecemeal and
fragmentary, a succession of particular instances, to be gathered up at
a future time into general principles, and stated in a rational form,
it is seen as empirical. But, after all, this is only a superficial
and external way of looking at it. If we examine into it we shall see
that there are contained in these transitory and particular experiences
certain truths more general and fundamental, which condition them, and
at the same time constitute their meaning.
If we inquire into the propriety of calling these truths "innate,"
we find it is because they are native to intelligence, and are not
acquisitions which it makes. Indeed, it may be said that they _are_
intelligence, so close and organic is their relation, just as the
muscles, the tendons, the skeleton, are the body. Thus it is that
Leibniz accepts the statement, _Nihil est in intellectu quod non
fuerit in sensu_, with the addition of the statement _nisi ipse
intellectus_. The doctrine of the existence of innate ideas is thus
shown to mean that intelligence exists with a real content which counts
for something in the realm of experience. If we take intelligence
and examine into its structure and ascertain its modes of expression,
we find organically inherent in its activity certain conceptions like
unity, power, substance, identity, etc., and these we call "innate." An
idea, in short, is no longer conceived as something existing in the
mind or in consciousness; it is an activity of intelligence. An innate
idea is a necessary activity of intelligence; that is, such an activity
as enters into the framework of all experience.
Leibniz thus succeeds in avoiding two errors into which philosophers
whose general aims are much like his have fallen. One is dividing _a
priori_ and _a posteriori_ truths from each other by a hard and fixed
line, so that we are conceived to have some knowledge which comes
wholly from experience, while there is another which comes wholly
from reason. According to Leibniz, there is no thought so abstract
that it does not have its connection with a sensible experience,
or rather its embodiment in it. And, on the other hand, there is no
experience so thoroughly sensuous that it does not bear in itself
traces of its origin in reason. "_All_ our thoughts come from the
depths of the soul," says Leibniz; there are none that "come" to us
from without. The other error is the interpretation of the existence
of innate ideas or "intuitions" (as this school generally calls them)
in a purely formal sense. They are thus considered as truths contained
in and somehow expressed by intelligence, but yet not so connected with
it that in knowing them we necessarily know intelligence itself. They
are considered rather as arbitrary determinations of truths by a power
whose own nature is conceivably foreign to truth, than as so many
special developments of an activity which may indifferently be called
"intelligence" or "truth." Leibniz, however, never fails to state that
an innate truth is, after all, but one form or aspect of the activity
of the mind in knowing.
In this way, by bringing to light a deeper and richer conception of
what in reality constitutes an innate idea, Leibniz answers Locke. His
reply is indirect; it consists rather in throwing a flood of new
light upon the matter discussed, than in a ponderous response and
counter-attack. But when Leibniz touches upon the conception of a
_tabula rasa_, of a mind which in itself is a mere blank, but has
the capacity for knowing, he assumes the offensive. The idea of a
bare capacity, a formal faculty, of power which does not already
involve some actual content within itself, he repudiates as a relic
of scholasticism. What is the soul, which has nothing until it gets
it from without? The doctrine of a vacuum, an emptiness which is real,
is always absurd; and it is doubly so when to this vacuum is ascribed
powers of feeling and thinking, as Locke does. Accepting for the
moment the metaphor of a _tabula rasa_, Leibniz asks where we shall
find a tablet which yet does not have some quality, and which is not
a co-operating cause, at least, in whatever effects are produced upon
it? The notion of a soul without thought, an empty tablet of the soul,
he says, is one of a thousand fictions of philosophers. He compares
it with the idea of "space empty of matter, absolute uniformity
or homogeneity, perfect spheres of the second element produced by
primordial perfect cubes, abstractions pure and simple, to which our
ignorance and inattention give birth, but of which reality does not
admit." If Locke admits then (as he does) certain capacities inherent
in the soul, he cannot mean the scholastic fiction of bare capacity
or mere possibility; he must mean "real possibilities,"--that is,
capacities accompanied with some actual tendency, an inclination, a
disposition, an aptitude, a preformation which determines our soul in a
certain direction, and which makes it necessary that the possibility
becomes actual. And this tendency, this actual inclination of
intelligence in one way rather than another, so that it is not a matter
of indifference to intelligence what it produces, is precisely what
constitutes an innate idea. So Leibniz feels certain that at bottom
Locke must agree with him in this matter if the latter is really in
earnest in rejecting the "faculties" of the scholastics and in wishing
for a real explanation of knowledge.
But the argument of Locke rests upon yet another basis. He founds
his denial of innate ideas not only upon a static conception of their
ready made existence "in" the soul, but also upon an equally mechanical
conception of consciousness. "Nothing can be in the mind which is not
in consciousness." This statement appears axiomatic to Locke, and by
it he would settle the whole discussion. Regarding it, Leibniz remarks
that if Locke has such a prejudice as this, it is not surprising that
he rejects innate ideas. But consciousness and mental activity are not
thus identical. To go no farther, the mere empirical fact of memory is
sufficient to show the falsity of such an idea. Memory reveals that
we have an indefinite amount of knowledge of which we are not always
conscious. Rather than that knowledge and consciousness are one, it
is true that actual consciousness only lays hold of an infinitesimal
fraction of knowledge. But Leibniz does not rely upon the fact of
memory alone. We must constantly keep in mind that to Leibniz the
soul is not a form of being wholly separate from nature, but is the
culmination of the system of reality. The reality is everywhere
the monad, and the soul is the monad with the power of feeling,
remembering, and connecting its ideas. The activities of the monad,
those representative changes which sum up and symbolize the universe,
do not cease when we reach the soul. They are continued. If the soul
has the power of attention, they are potentially conscious. Such as
the soul actually attends to, thus giving them relief and making them
distinct, are actually conscious. But all of them exist.
Thus it is that Leibniz not only denies the equivalence of soul and
consciousness, but asserts that the fundamental error of the psychology
of the Cartesians (and here, at least, Locke is a Cartesian) is in
identifying them. He asserts that "unconscious ideas" are of as great
importance in psychology as molecules are in physics. They are the link
between unconscious nature and the conscious soul. Nothing happens all
at once; nature never makes jumps; these facts stated in the law of
continuity necessitate the existence of activities, which may be called
ideas, since they belong to the soul and yet are not in consciousness.
When, therefore, Locke asks how an innate idea can exist and the soul
not be conscious of it, the answer is at hand. The "innate idea"
exists as an activity of the soul by which it represents--that is,
expresses--some relation of the universe, although we have not yet
become conscious of what is contained or enveloped in this activity. To
become conscious of the innate idea is to lift it from the sphere of
nature to the conscious life of spirit. And thus it is, again, that
Leibniz can assert that all ideas whatever proceed from the depths of
the soul. It is because it is the very being of the soul as a monad
to reflect "from its point of view" the world. In this way Leibniz
brings the discussion regarding innate ideas out of the plane of
examination into a matter of psychological fact into a consideration
of the essential nature of spirit. An innate idea is now seen to be
one of the relations by which the soul reproduces some relation which
constitutes the universe of reality, and at the same time realizes its
own individual nature. It is one reflection from that spiritual mirror,
the soul. With this enlarged and transformed conception of an idea apt
to be so meagre we may well leave the discussion. There has been one
mind at least to which the phrase "innate ideas" meant something worth
contending for, because it meant something real.
CHAPTER V.
SENSATION AND EXPERIENCE.
A careful study of the various theories which have been held
concerning sensation would be of as much interest and importance as
an investigation of any one point in the range of philosophy. In the
theory of a philosopher about sensation we have the reflex of his
fundamental category and the clew to his further doctrine. Sensation
stands on the border-line between the world of nature and the realm of
soul; and every advance in science, every development of philosophy,
leaves its impress in a change in the theory of sensation. Apparently
one of the simplest and most superficial of questions, in reality
it is one of the most difficult and far-reaching. At first sight it
seems as if it were a sufficient account of sensation to say that
an object affects the organ of sense, and thus impresses upon the
mind the quality which it possesses. But this simple statement
arouses a throng of further questions: How is it possible that
one substance,--matter,--should affect another,--mind? How can a
causal relation exist between them? Is the mind passive or active
in this impression? How can an object convey unchanged to the mind
a quality which it possesses? Or is the sensational _quale_ itself
a product of the mind's activity? If so, what is the nature of the
object which excites the sensation? As known, it is only a collection
of sensuous qualities; if these are purely mental, what becomes of
the object? And if there is no object really there, what is it that
excites the sensation? Such questionings might be continued almost
indefinitely; but those given are enough to show that an examination
of the nature and origin of sensation introduces us to the problems
of the relation of intelligence and the world; to the problem of
the ultimate constitution of an object which is set over against a
subject and which affects it; and to the problem of the nature of mind,
which as thus affected from without must be limited in its nature,
but which as bearer of the whole known universe must be in some sense
infinite. If we consider, not the mode of production of sensation,
but its relation to knowledge, we find philosophical schools divided
into two,--Sensationalists, and Rationalists. If we inquire into its
functions, we find that the empiricist sees in it convincing evidence
of the fact that all knowledge originates from a source _extra mentem_;
that the intellectual idealist finds in it evidence of the gradual
transition of nature into spirit; that the ethical idealist, like Kant
and Fichte, sees in it the material of the phenomenal world, which is
necessary in its opposition to the rational sphere in order that there
may occur that conflict of pure law and sensuous impulse which alone
makes morality possible. We thus realize that as we look at the various
aspects of sensation, we are taken into the discussion of ontology, of
the theory of knowledge and of ethics.
Locke virtually recognizes the extreme importance of the doctrine of
sensation, and his second book might almost be entitled "Concerning the
Nature and Products of Sensation." On the other hand, one of the most
characteristic and valuable portions of the reply of Leibniz is in his
development of a theory of sensation which is thoroughly new, except as
we seek for its germs in its thoughts of Plato and Aristotle. According
to Locke, knowledge originates from two sources,--sensation and
reflection. Sensations are "the impressions made on our senses by
outward objects that are extrinsic to the mind." When the mind "comes
to reflect on its own operations about the ideas got by sensation,
and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas," it gets ideas of
reflection.
If we leave out of account for the present the ideas of reflection,
we find that the ideas which come through sensation have two main
characteristics. First, in having sensations, the mind is passive;
its part is purely receptive. The objects impress themselves upon
the mind, they obtrude into consciousness, whether the mind will or
not. There is a purely external relation existing between sensation
and the understanding. The ideas are offered to the mind, and the
understanding cannot refuse to have them, cannot change them, blot
them out, nor create them, any more than a mirror can refuse, alter,
or obliterate the images which objects produce in it. Sensation,
in short, is a purely passive having of ideas. Secondly, every
sensation is simple. Locke would say of sensations what Hume said of
all ideas,--every distinct sensation is a separate existence. Every
sensation is "uncompounded, containing nothing but one uniform
appearance, not being distinguishable into different ideas." Knowledge
is henceforth a process of compounding, of repeating, comparing, and
uniting sensation. Man's understanding "reaches no further than to
compound and divide the materials that are made to his hand."
It hardly need be said that Locke has great difficulty in keeping up
this thoroughly atomic theory of mind. It is a theory which makes all
relations external; they are, as Locke afterwards says, "superinduced"
upon the facts. It makes it impossible to account for any appearance
of unity and connection among ideas, and Locke quietly, and without
any consciousness of the contradiction involved, introduces certain
inherent relations into the structure of the ideas when he comes to his
constructive work. "Existence and unity are two ideas," he says, "that
are suggested to the understanding by every object without, and every
idea within."
At other places he introduces the idea of quality of a substance,
effect of a cause, continued permanence or identity into a sensation,
as necessary constituents of it; thus making a sensation a unity of
complex elements instead of an isolated bare notion. How far he could
have got on in his account of knowledge without this surreptitious
qualifying of a professedly simple existence, may be seen by asking
what would be the nature of a sensation which did not possess existence
and unity, and which was not conceived as the quality of a thing or as
the effect of an external reality.
This digression has been introduced at this point because the next
character of a sensation which Locke discusses is its objective
character,--its relation to the object which produces it. To
discourse of our ideas intelligibly, he says, it will be convenient
to distinguish them as they are ideas in our minds and as they are
modifications of matter in the bodies that cause them. In other
words, he gives up all thought of considering ideas as simply mental
modifications, and finds it necessary to take them in their relations
to objects.
Taking them in this way, he finds that they are to be divided into
two classes, of which one contains those ideas that are copies and
resemblances of qualities in the objects, ideas "which are really in
the object, whether we take notice of them or no,"--in which case we
have an idea of the thing as it is in itself; while the other class
contains those which are in no way resemblances of the objects which
produce them, "having no more similitude than the idea of pain and of a
sword." The former are primary qualities, and are solidity, extension,
figure, motion or rest, and number; while the secondary qualities
are colors, smells, and tastes. The former ideas are produced by
impulse of the bodies themselves, which simply effect a transference
of their qualities over into the mind; while the secondary qualities
are arbitrarily annexed by the power of God to the objects which excite
them.
It will be noticed that there are two elements which make the sensation
of Locke what it is. With reference to its _production_, it is the
effect which one substance, matter, has upon another substance,
mind, which is unlike it in nature, and between which whatever
relations exist, are thoroughly incomprehensible, so that, indeed,
their connections with each other can be understood only by recourse
to a _tertium quid_, an omnipotent power which can arbitrarily produce
such collocations as please it. With reference to its _function_, it
is the isolated and "simple" (that is, non-relational) element out
of which all actual forms of knowledge are made by composition and
re-arrangement.
Leibniz, without entering into explicit criticism of just these two
points, develops his own theory with reference to them. To Leibniz,
reality constitutes a system; that is, it is of such a nature that
its various portions have an essential and not merely external
relation to one another. Sensation is of course no exception. It is
not a mere accident, nor yet a supernatural yoking of things naturally
opposed. It has a meaning in that connection of things which constitute
the universe. It contributes to the significance of the world. It
is one way in which those activities which make the real express
themselves. It has its place or reason in the totality of things, and
this whether we consider its origin or its position with regard to
knowledge. In a word, while the characteristic of Locke's theory is
that he conceives sensation as in external relation both to reality,
as mechanically produced by it, and to knowledge, as being merely
one of the atomic elements which may enter into a compound, Leibniz
regards reality as organic to sensation, and this in turn as organic
to knowledge. We have here simply an illustration of the statement
with which we set out; namely, that the treatment of sensation always
reflects the fundamental philosophical category of the philosopher.
All reality exists in the form of monads; monads are simple substances
whose nature is action; this action consists in representing, according
to a certain law of succession, the universe. Various monads have
various degrees of activity; that is, of the power of reflecting
the world. So much of Leibniz's general philosophical attitude it is
necessary to recall, to understand what he means by "sensation." The
generic name which is applied to this mirroring activity of the monads
is "perception," which, as Leibniz often says, is to be carefully
distinguished from apperception, which is the representation become
conscious. Perception may be defined, therefore, as the inclusion of
the many or multiform (the world of objects) in a unity (the simple
substance). It was the great defect of previous philosophy that it
"considered only spirits or self-conscious beings as souls," and
had consequently recognized only conscious perceptions. It had been
obliged, therefore, to make an impassable gulf between mind and matter,
and sensations were thus rendered inexplicable. But Leibniz finds his
function as a philosopher in showing that these problems, which seem
insoluble, arise when we insist upon erecting into actual separations
or differences of kind what really are only stages of development
or differences of degree. A sensation is not an effect which one
substance impresses upon another because God pleased that it should, or
because of an incomprehensible incident in the original constitution of
things. It is a higher development of that representative power which
belongs to every real being.
Certain monads reach a state of development, or manifestation of
activity, which is characterized by the possession of distinct
organs. Such monads may be called, in a pre-eminent sense, "souls,"
and include all the higher animals as well as man. This possession of
differentiated organs finds its analogue in the internal condition of
the monad. What appears externally as an organ of sense appears ideally
as a conscious representative state which we call "sensation." "When,"
Leibniz says, "the monad has its organs so developed that there
is relief and differentiation in the impressions received, and
consequently in the perceptions which represent them, we have feeling
or sensation; that is, a perception accompanied by memory," to which
at other times he adds "attention." Life, he says, "is a perceptive
principle; the soul is sensitive life; mind is rational soul." And
again he says in substance that when the soul begins to have interests,
and to regard one representation as of more value than others, it
introduces relief into its perceptions, and those which stand out are
called "sensations."
This origin of sensations as higher developments of the representative
activities of a monad conditions their relation to further processes
of knowledge. The sensations are confused knowledge; they are ideas
in their primitive and most undifferentiated form. They constitute,
as Leibniz somewhere says, the vertigo of the conscious life. In every
sentient organism multitudes of sensations are constantly thronging in
and overpowering its distinct consciousness. The soul is so flooded
with ideas of everything in the world which has any relation to
its body that it has distinct ideas of nothing. Higher knowledge,
then, does not consist in compounding these sensations; that would
literally make confusion worse confounded. It consists in introducing
distinctness into the previously confused sensations,--in finding out
what they mean; that is, in finding out their bearings, what they point
to, and how they are related. Knowledge is not an external process
performed upon the sensations, it is the development of their internal
content.
It follows, therefore, that sensation is organic to all forms of
knowledge whatever. The monad, which is pure activity, that which
culminates the scale of reality, has no confused ideas, and to it
all knowledge is eternally rational, having no sensible traces about
it. But every other monad, having its activity limited, has ideas
which come to it at first in a confused way, and which its activity
afterwards differentiates. Thus it is that Leibniz can agree so
heartily with the motto of the Sensationalist school,--that there is
nothing in the intellect which was not first in the sensory. But
Leibniz uses this phrase as Aristotle would have done, having
in mind the distinction between potentiality and actuality. _In
posse_, sensation is all knowledge; but only _in posse_. And he, like
Aristotle, interprets the relation between potentiality and actuality
as one of a difference of activity. The potential is that which
becomes real through a dynamic process. The actual is capacity plus
action. Sensation, in short, is spiritual activity in an undeveloped
and hence partial and limited condition. It is not, as Locke would have
it, the real factor in all knowledge.
The marks of sensation which Locke lays down,--their passivity, their
simplicity, their position as the real element in knowledge,--Leibniz
either denies, therefore, or accepts in a sense different from that of
Locke. Strictly speaking, sensation is an activity of the mind. There
are no windows through which the soul receives impressions. Pure
passivity of any kind is a myth, a scholastic fiction. Sensation is
developed from the soul within; it is the activity of reality made
manifest to itself. It is a higher kind of action than anything we find
in minerals or in plants. If we look at sensation ideally, however,
that is, according to the position which it holds in the system
of knowledge, it is properly regarded as passive. It represents the
limitation, the unrealized (that is, the non-active) side of spiritual
life.
"Efficient causality" is a term which has its rightful and legitimate
use in physical science. Simply from the scientific point of view
we are correct in speaking of objects as affecting the body, and the
body, through its nervous system, as affecting the soul and producing
sensations. But philosophy does not merely use categories, it explains
them. And Leibniz contends that to explain the category of causality
in a mechanical sense, to understand by it physical influence actually
transferred from one thing to another, is to make the idea inexplicable
and irrational. The true meaning of causality is ideal. It signifies
the relative positions which the objects concerned have in the
harmonious system of reality. The body that is higher in the scale
impresses the other; that is to say, it dominates it or gives its
law. There is no energy or quality which passes physically from one
to the other. But one monad, as higher in the stage of development
than another, makes an ideal demand upon that one. It places before
the other its own more real condition. The less-developed monad, since
its whole activity consists in representing the universe of reality,
answers to this demand by developing the corresponding quality in
itself. The category of harmonious or co-operative action is thus
substituted for that of external and mechanical influence. Physical
causality when given a philosophic interpretation means organic
development. The reality of a higher stage is the more active: the
more active has a greater content in that it mirrors the universe more
fully; it manifests accordingly more of the law of the universe, and
hence has an ideal domination over that which is lower in the scale. It
is actually (that is, in activity) what the other is potentially. But
as the entire existence of the latter is in representing or setting
forth the relations which make the world, its activity is aroused to a
corresponding production. Hence the former is called "cause," and the
latter "effect."
This introduces us to the relation of soul and body, or, more generally
stated, to the relation of mind and matter. It is the theory of
co-operation, of harmonious activity, which Leibniz substitutes for
the theory which Descartes had formulated, according to which there
are two opposed substances which can affect each other only through
the medium of a _deus ex machina_. Locke, on the other hand, took the
Cartesian principle for granted, and thus enveloped himself in all the
difficulties which surround the question of "mind and matter." Locke
wavers between two positions, one of which is that there are two
unknown substances,--the soul and the object in itself,--which, coming
in contact, produce sensations; while the other takes the hypothetical
attitude that there may be but one substance,--matter,--and that
God, out of the plenitude of his omnipotence, has given matter a
capacity which does not naturally belong to it,--that of producing
sensations. In either case, however, the final recourse is to the
arbitrary power of God. There is no natural--that is, intrinsic and
explicable--connection between the sensation and that which produces
it. Sensation occupied the hard position which the mechanical school
of to-day still allots it. It is that "inexplicable," "mysterious,"
"unaccountable" link between the domains of matter and mind of which no
rational account can be given, but which is yet the source of all that
we know about matter, and the basis of all that is real in the mind!
Leibniz, recognizing that reality is an organic whole,--not two parts
with a chasm between them,--says that "God does not arbitrarily give
substances whatever qualities may happen, or that he may arbitrarily
determine, but only such as are natural; that is, such as are
related to one another in an _explicable_ way as modifications of
the substance." Leibniz feels sure that to introduce the idea of the
inexplicable, the purely supernatural, into the natural is to give up
all the advantages which the modern mechanical theory had introduced,
and to relapse into the meaningless features of scholasticism. If the
"supernatural"--that is, the essentially inexplicable--is introduced
in this one case, why should it not be in others; why should we not
return outright to the "fanatic philosophy which explains all facts by
simply attributing them to God immediately or by way of miracle, or to
the barbarian philosophy, which explains phenomena by manufacturing,
_ad hoc_, occult qualities or faculties, seemingly like little
demons or spirits capable of performing, without ceremony, whatever
is required,--as if watches marked time by their horodeictic power,
without wheels, and mills ground grain, without grindstones, by their
fractive power"? In fact, says Leibniz, by introducing the inexplicable
into our _explanations_ "we fall into something worse than occult
qualities,--we give up philosophy and reason; we open asylums for
ignorance and laziness, holding not only that there are qualities which
we do not understand (there are, indeed, too many such), but qualities
which the greatest intelligence, if God gave it all the insight
possible, could not understand,--that is, such as are _in themselves_
without rhyme or reason. And indeed it would be a thing without
rhyme or reason that God should perform miracles in the ordinary
course of nature." And regarding the whole matter of introducing the
inconceivable and the inexplicable into science, he says that "while
the conception of men is not the measure of God's power, their capacity
of conception is the measure of _nature's_ power, since everything
occurring in the natural order is capable of being understood by the
created intelligence." Such being the thought of Leibniz regarding the
virtual attempt to introduce in his day the unknowable into philosophy,
it is evident that he must reject, from the root up, all theories of
sensation which, like Locke's, make it the product of the inexplicable
intercourse of two substances.
For this doctrine, then, Leibniz substitutes that of an infinite number
of substances, all of the same kind, all active, all developing from
within, all conspiring to the same end, but of various stages of
activity, or bearing various relations of completeness to the one end.
Indeed, one and the same monad has various degrees of activity in
itself; that is, it represents more or less distinctly the universe
according to its point of view. Its point of view requires of it, of
course, primarily, a representation of that which is about it. Thus
an infinity of states arises, each corresponding to some one of the
multitude of objects surrounding the monad. The soul has no control,
no mastery, over these states. It has to take them as they come; with
regard to them, the soul appears passive. It appears so because it does
not as yet clearly distinguish them. It does not react upon them and
become conscious of their meaning or thoroughly rational character. We
shall afterwards see that "matter" is, with Leibniz, simply this
passive or confused side of monads. It is the monad so far as it has
not brought to light the rational activity which is immanent in it. At
present we need only notice that the body is simply the part of matter
or of passivity which limits the complete activity of any monad. So
Leibniz says, "in so far as the soul has perfection, it has distinct
thoughts, and God has accommodated the body to the soul. So far as it
is imperfect and its perceptions are confused, God has accommodated the
soul to the body in such a way that the soul lets itself be inclined by
the passions, which are born from corporeal representations. It is by
its confused thoughts (sensations) that the soul represents the bodies
about it," just as, we may add, its distinct thoughts represent the
monads or souls about it, and, in the degree of their distinctness,
God, the monad which is _purus actus_.
Following the matter into more detail, we may say that since God alone
is pure energy, knowing no limitation, God alone is pure spirit. Every
finite soul is joined to an organic body. "I do not admit," says
Leibniz, "that there are souls entirely separate from matter, nor
created spirits detached from body. . . . It is this body which
the monad represents most distinctly; but since this body expresses the
entire universe by the connection of all matter throughout it, the soul
represents the entire universe in representing the body which belongs
to it most particularly." But according to the principle of continuity
there must be in the least apparent portion of matter still "a universe
of creatures, of souls, of entelechies. There is nothing sterile,
nothing dead in the universe. It is evident from these considerations
that every living body has a dominant entelechy, which is the soul in
that body, but that the members of this living body are again full of
other living beings and souls," which, however, since not of so high
a grade, that is, not representing the universe so fully, appear to be
wholly material and subject to the "dominant" entelechy; namely, to the
one which gives the law to the others by expressing more adequately
the idea at which they only confusedly aim. Owing to the constant
change of activity, however, these particles do not remain in constant
subordination to the same entelechy (that is, do not form parts of the
same body), but pass on to higher or lower degrees of "evolution,"
and have their places taken by others undergoing similar processes
of change. Thus "all bodies are in a perpetual flux, like rivers,
with parts continually leaving and entering in." Or, interpreting
this figurative language, each monad is continually, in its process
of development, giving law to new and less developed monads, which
therefore appear as its body. The nature of matter in itself, and of
its phenomenal manifestation in the body, are, however, subjects which
find no explanation here, and which will demand explanation in another
chapter.
We may sum up Leibniz's theory of sensation by saying that it is a
representative state developed by the self-activity of the soul; that
in itself it is a confused or "involved" grade of activity, and in
its relation to the world represents the confused or passive aspects
of existence; that this limitation of the monad constitutes matter,
and in its necessary connection with the monad constitutes the body
which is always joined to the finite soul; that to this body are joined
in all cases an immense number of monads, whose action is subordinate
to that of this dominant monad, and that it is the collection of these
which constitute the visible animal body. Thus if we look at sensation
with regard to the monad which possesses it, it is a product of the
body of the monad; if we look at it with reference to other monads,
it represents or reflects their passive or material side. This is
evidently one aspect again of the pre-established harmony,--an aspect
in which some of the narrower of Leibniz's critics have seen the whole
meaning of the doctrine exhausted. It is, however, simply one of the
many forms in which the harmony, the union of spiritual and mechanical,
ideal and material, meets us. In truth, while in other systems the fact
of sensation is a fact demanding some artificial mode of reconciling
"mind" and "matter," or is else to be accepted as an inexplicable fact,
in the system of Leibniz it is itself evidence that the spiritual
and the mechanical are not two opposed kinds of existence, but are
organically united. It is itself the manifestation of the harmony
of the ideal and the material, not something which requires that
a factitious theory be invented for explaining their appearance of
harmony. Sensation has within itself the ideal element, for it is the
manifestation, in its most undeveloped form, of the spiritual meaning
of the universe. It has a mechanical element, for it expresses the
limitation, the passivity, of the monad.
It is from this standpoint that Leibniz criticises what Locke says
about the relation of sensations to the objects which produce
them. Leibniz holds that all our sensations have a definite and
natural connection with the qualities of objects,--the "secondary"
as well as the "primary." They all represent certain properties of the
object. Even the pain which the thrust of a needle gives us, while it
does not resemble anything in the needle, does in some way represent
or resemble motions going on in our body. This resemblance is not
necessarily one of exact form, but just as the ellipse, hyperbola,
and parabola are projections of the circle in the sense that there
is a natural and fixed law of connection between them, so that every
point of one corresponds by a certain relation with every point of the
other, so the resemblance between the sensation and the quality of the
object is always in the form of a fixed law of order, which, however
unknown to us it may now be, is capable of being found out. If we are
to make any distinction between "secondary" and "primary" sensations,
it should be not that one presents qualities that are in the objects,
and the other affections which exist only in us, but that the primary
sensations (of number, form, size, etc.) represent the qualities in
a distinct way, appealing to the rational activity of intelligence,
while the secondary represent the qualities in a confused way, a way
not going beyond the effect upon the mind into relations, that is, into
distinct knowledge.
This brings regularly before us the question of the relation of
sensations to knowledge. We have seen enough already to know that
Leibniz does not believe that knowledge begins with the simple (that
is, unrelated), and then proceeds by a process of compounding. The
sensation is not simple to Leibniz, but thoroughly complex, involving
confusedly within itself all possible relations. As relations are
brought forth into distinct light out of this confusion, knowledge
ends rather than begins with the simple. And again it is evident that
Leibniz cannot believe that knowledge begins and ends in experience,
in the sense in which both himself and Locke use the word; namely, as
meaning the combination and succession of impressions.
"Experience," as they use the term, consists in sensations and their
association,--"consecution" as Leibniz calls it. Experience is the
stage of knowledge reached by animals, and in which the majority
of men remain,--and indeed all men in the greater part of their
knowledge. Leibniz takes just the same position regarding the larger
part of our knowledge which Hume takes regarding it all. It consists
simply in associations of such a nature that when one part recurs
there is a tendency to expect the recurrence of the other member. It
resembles reason, but it is based on the accidental experience of
events in a consecutive order, and not on knowledge of their causal
connection. We all expect the sun to rise to-morrow; but with all of
us, excepting the astronomer, such expectation is purely "empirical,"
being based on the images of past experiences which recur. The
astronomer, however, sees into the grounds, that is, the reasons, of
the expectation, and hence his knowledge is rational.
Thus we have two grades of knowledge,--one empirical, consisting
of knowledge of facts; the other rational, being of the truths
of reason. The former is contingent and particular, the latter is
necessary and universal. Leibniz insists, with a pertinacity which
reminds us of Kant, that "experience" can give instances or examples
only, and that the fact that anything has happened in a given way
any number of times in the past, can give no assurance that it will
continue to do so in the future. There is nothing in the nature
of the case which renders its exact opposite impossible. But a
rational truth is necessary, for its opposite is impossible, being
irrational or meaningless. This may not always be evident in the
case of a complex rational truth; but if it be analyzed into simpler
elements, as a geometrical proposition into definitions, axioms, and
postulates, the absurdity of its opposite becomes evident. Sensation,
in conclusion, is the having of confused ideas,--ideas corresponding
to matter. Experience is the association of these confused ideas, and
their association according to their accidental juxtaposition in the
life of the soul. It therefore is not only thoroughly sensible, but is
also phenomenal. Its content is sensations; its form is contingent and
particular consecution. Both form and content, accordingly, need to be
reconstructed if they are to be worthy of the name of science or of
knowledge. This is the position which Leibniz assumes as against the
empiricist, Locke. The details of this reconstruction, its method and
result, we must leave till we come in the course of the argument again
to the subject of knowledge.
CHAPTER VI.
THE IMPULSES AND THE WILL.
Locke, after discussing the subject of innate ideas in their relation
to knowledge, goes on to discuss their practical side, or connection
with will. We shall follow him in this as Leibniz does; but we shall
consider in connection with this, Leibniz's general theory of will,
which is developed partially in this chapter, but more completely
in his critical remarks upon what Locke has to say of the notion of
"power." Since the theory of morals is as closely connected with will
as the theory of knowledge is with the intellect, we shall supplement
this discussion with what Leibniz says upon the ethical question,
drawing our material somewhat freely from his other writings.
The doctrine of will which Leibniz propounds is in closest harmony
with his conception of intelligence, and this not merely in the way
of empirical juxtaposition, but as the result of his fundamental
principles. If we recall what has been said concerning the monad,
we shall remember that it is an activity, but an activity with a
content. It is a force, but a force which mirrors the universe. The
content, that portion of reality which is reflected in the action,
is knowledge, or the idea; the activity which brings this about is
will, or the volition. They are related to each other as form and
content. There is, strictly speaking, no "state" of mind; there is
only a tension, a pushing forward of mind. There is no idea which
is not a volition. Will is thus used, in a very broad sense, as
equivalent to action. Since, however, the activity of the monad is
in no case aimless, but has an end in view, the will is not _mere_
activity in general, it is action towards some definite end. And since
the end at which the monad aims is always the development of an idea,
the reflection of some constituent of the universe, the will is always
directed towards and determined by some idea of the intellect.
We have seen, however, that there are various stages in the reflecting
power of the soul, or in the realization of intellect. Taking
only the broadest division, there are perception and apperception;
that is, there are the conscious and the unconscious mirroring of
reality. We shall expect, then, to find two corresponding stages of
volition. Leibniz calls these stages "appetition" and "volition"
in the narrower sense. The constant tendency in every monad to go
from one perception to another,--that is, the following of the law
of development,--constitutes appetition. If joined to feeling,
it constitutes instinct. Since, again, there are two degrees of
apperception, one of empirical, the other of rational, consciousness,
we shall expect to find two grades of volition proper,--one
corresponding to action for conscious particular ends; the other
for ends which are proposed by reason, and are hence universal. In
this chapter we shall simply expand and illustrate these various
propositions.
Sensations, looked at not as to what they represent, but in
themselves, are impulses. As such they constitute the lowest stage
of will. Impulsive action then includes all such as occurs for an
end which is unknown, or at best but dimly felt. Such action may be
called blind, not in the sense that it is without reason, but in the
sense that reason is not consciously present. We are not to think of
this instinctive action, however, as if it were found simply in the
animals. Much of human action is also impulsive; probably, indeed,
an impulsive factor is contained in our most rational willing. We are
never able to take complete account of the agencies which are acting
upon us. Along with the reasons of which we are conscious in choosing,
there are mingled faint memories of past experience, subconscious
solicitations of the present, dim expectations for the future. Such
elements are decisive factors far more than we realize.
Indeed, it is because of the extent to which such unconscious
influences bear upon us and move us that there arises the idea
of indifferent or unmotivated choice. Were both motive and choice
unconscious, the question as to whether choice were antecedently
determined would not arise; and were our motives and their results
wholly in consciousness, the solution of the question would be
evident. But when we are conscious of our choice, but are not conscious
of our impulses and motives, we get the impression that our choice is
unmotived, and hence come to believe in "indifferent freedom,"--the
ability to choose as we will.
We shall shortly take up in more detail the theory of Leibniz regarding
the freedom of will; and it is needful here to remark only that the
conception which makes it consist in ability to choose without reason
is in direct contradiction to his fundamental thought,--namely, that
there can be no activity which does not aim at some reflection of the
universe, by which, therefore, it is determined. From the psychological
point of view, it is interesting also to notice how Leibniz's theory
of unconscious ideas enables him to dispose of the strongest argument
for indifferent choice,--that drawn from the immediate "testimony"
of consciousness.
Upon the origin and nature of desires Leibniz has much more to say
than about the impulses. His account of the transition from impulse
to desire is based upon the conception of unconscious ideas. Slight
and imperceptible impulses are working upon us all the time. Indeed,
they are a necessity; for the actual state of a soul or monad at any
time is, of course, one of incompleteness. Our nature must always work
to free itself from its hindrances and obtain its goal of complete
development. But it will not do this unless there is some stimulus,
some solicitation to induce it to overcome its limitation. There is
found accordingly in our every condition a feeling of dissatisfaction,
or, using Locke's word, of "uneasiness;" and it is this which
calls forth that activity which brings about a nearer approach to
the soul's real good. But Leibniz differs from Locke in saying that
this feeling of uneasiness is not a distinct, or even in most cases a
conscious, one. It is not pain, although it differs from pain only in
degree. Uneasiness and pain are related to each other as appetite for
food is to hunger,--the first suffices to stimulate us to satisfaction,
but if the want is not met, results in actual pain; if met, these "half
pains" become tributary to pleasure itself. These unconscious stimuli
to action result in actions which meet the want, and the aggregation of
these satisfactions results in pleasure. In Leibniz's own words:--
"If these elements of pain were themselves true pains, we should
always be in a state of misery, even in pursuing the good. But since
there is always going on a summation of minute successes in overcoming
these states of uneasiness, and these put us more and more at ease,
there comes about a decided pleasure, which often has greater value
even than the enjoyment of the good. Far, then, from regarding this
uneasiness as a thing incompatible with happiness, I find that it is
an essential condition of our happiness. For this does not consist
in perfect possession, which would make us insensible and stupid, but
in a constant progress towards greater results, which must always be
accompanied, accordingly, by this element of desire or uneasiness."
And again he says that "we enjoy all the advantages of pain without any
of its inconveniences. If the uneasiness should become too distinct,
we should be miserable in our awaiting the good which relieves it; but
as it is, there is a constant victory over these half-pains, which we
always find in desire, and this gives us a quantity of half-pleasures,
whose continuance and summation (for they acquire force like a moving
body as it falls) result in a whole and true pleasure." In short,
there is indeed an element of pain in all desire which stimulates
us to action, and therefore to higher development. But ordinarily
this element of pain is not present as such in consciousness, but
is absorbed in the pleasure which accompanies the realization of the
higher good. Thus Leibniz, accepting and emphasizing the very same fact
that served Schopenhauer as a psychological base of pessimism, uses it
as a foundation-stone of optimism.
But desire, or the conscious tendency towards something required as a
good, accompanied by the dim feeling of uneasiness at its absence, does
not yet constitute the complete act of volition. "Several impulses and
inclinations meet in forming the complete volition which is the result
of their conflict." In the concrete act of will there are contained
impulses which push us towards some end whose nature is not known;
there is desire both in its inchoate stage, where pleasure and pain
are not in consciousness, and in its formed state, where the pain
and pleasure are definitely presented. Mixed with these desires and
impulses are images of past experiences which call up the feelings
which were formerly attached to them, and thus there are aroused
indirectly additional impulses and desires. Out of this complicated
mass of impulses, desires, and feelings, both original and reproduced,
comes the "dominant effort" which constitutes complete will. But what
governs the production of this prevailing or dominant effort, which we
may interpret as the act of choice? The answer is simple: the result
of the conflict of these various factors, the striking of the balance,
_is_ the choice. Some desire emerges from the confused complex, and
that desire is the final determination of the will. This desire may
not in all cases be the strongest in itself,--that is, the one whose
satisfaction will allay the greatest "uneasiness," for the others,
taken together, may outweigh it; it may, so to speak, have a plurality,
but not a majority, of volitional forces on its side,--and in this case
a fusion of opposing factors may defeat it. But in any event the result
will be the _algebraic_ sum of the various desires and impulses.
It is not at all necessary, however, that the net outcome shall make
itself apparent as a mechanical equivalent of the forces at work. The
soul, Leibniz says, may use its skill in the formation of parties,
so as to make this or that side the victor. How is this to be done,
and still disallow the possibility of arbitrary choice? This problem
is solved through action becoming deliberate. Deliberate action is
impossible unless the soul has formed the habit of looking ahead and
of arranging for modes of action which do not present themselves as
immediate necessities. Only in this way can one look at the matter
impartially and coolly; "at the moment of combat there is no time for
discussion. Everything which then occurs throws its full force on the
balance, and contributes to an outcome made up in the same way as in
mechanics." The formation of certain habits beforehand, therefore, is
the secret of translating impulsive action into the deliberate sphere.
Of these habits the simplest consists in thinking only occasionally and
incidentally of certain things. Imagination is the mother of desire. If
we do not allow the imagination to dwell upon certain lines of thought,
the probability of such thoughts acquiring sufficient force to become
motives of weight is small. A still more effective method of regulating
action is "to accustom ourselves to forming a train of thoughts of
which reason, and not chance (that is, association), is the basis. We
must get out of the tumult of present impressions, beyond our immediate
surroundings, and ask: _Dic cur hic? respice finem!_" In other words,
we must cross-question our impulses and desires, we must ask whence
they come, that we may see how valid are the credentials which they
offer. We must ask whither they tend, that we may measure them, not by
their immediate interest, but by their relation to an end. The desires
are not to be taken at their face-value, but are to be weighed and
compared.
Such a process will evidently result in arresting instantaneous
action. There will be a pause between the presentation of the
desires and the overt act. During this pause it may well occur that
the examination to which the desires have been subject has awakened
contrary desires. The thought of the ignoble origin of a desire or of
its repulsive, though remote, result will bring into action desires of
an opposed kind. Thus the soul regulates action, not as if, however, it
had any direct influence over desires, but by its ability of bringing
other desires into the field. The will, in short, is not opposed to
desire, though rational desire may be opposed to sensuous desire. "By
various artifices, then," Leibniz concludes, "we become masters of
ourselves, and can make ourselves think and do that which we ought
to will, and which reason ordains." Such is the summary of Leibniz's
analysis of the elements and mechanism of volition. There was not much
psychology existing at the time which could aid him in such an acute
and subtle account; only in Aristotle could he have found much help. On
the other hand, it has been so generally incorporated into current
psychology that we may seem to have wasted space in repeating truisms.
Of moral action, however, we have as yet heard nothing. We have an
account of a psychological mechanism; but for what ethical end does
this work, and by what method? This question may best be answered
by turning in more detail to the question of the "freedom of the
will." Freedom in the sense of arbitrary choice Leibniz wholly
rejects, as we have seen. It is inconsistent with at least two of
his fundamental principles; those, namely, of sufficient reason,
and of continuity. "Everything that occurs must have a sufficient
reason for its occurrence." This oft-repeated dictum of Leibniz, the
logical way of stating the complete rationality of experience, would
be shattered into fragments by collision with groundless choice. It
conflicts equally (indeed for the same reason) with the principle of
continuity. "The present is pregnant with the future." "Nature never
makes leaps." "An absolute equilibrium is a chimera." "The soul is
never wholly at rest." These are only various ways of saying that the
notion of arbitrary or unmotivated choice rests upon the assumption
that there is a complete break in the life of the soul, so that it
is possible for something to happen which bears no organic relation
to anything that precedes. The notion of a state of the soul without
motives, followed by the irruption of a certain line of conduct, the
notion of an equilibrium broken by arbitrary choice, is simply the
counterpart of the idea of a vacuum. All that makes Leibniz reject the
latter conception makes it impossible for him to accept the former.
This should not be interpreted to mean that Leibniz denied the "freedom
of the will." What he denied is a notion of freedom which seemed to him
at once unverifiable, useless, and irrational. There is a conception
of freedom which Leibniz not only accepts, but insists upon. Such a
notion of freedom is indeed his ethical ideal. Its three traits are
contingency, spontaneity, and rationality of action. How action can
be at the same time contingent and determined is perhaps difficult
to understand; but Leibniz takes the position that it is. His first
step is to distinguish between physical, mathematical, metaphysical,
and moral necessity. There are truths which are eternal, truths
which are absolutely necessary, because their opposites involve
contradiction. They cannot be violated without involving us in
absurdity. There are other truths which are "positive," that is,
ordained for good reason. These truths may be _a priori_, or rational,
and not merely empirical; for they have been chosen for reasons of
advantage. God always chooses and ordains the best of a number of
possibilities; but he does it, not because the opposite is impossible,
but because it is inferior. Truths whose opposites are impossible
have metaphysical and mathematical necessity. Positive truths have
moral necessity. The principle of causation _must_ be true; the three
interior angles of a triangle _must_ be equal to two right angles. But
that God shall choose the better of two courses is a moral necessity
only. It invokes no absolute logical contradiction to conceive him
choosing some other way. Upon moral necessity depends the physical. The
particular laws of nature are necessary, not because their opposites
are logically absurd, but because these laws are most in accordance
with the general principles of good and order, in agreement with which
God chooses. Physical and moral action is therefore in all cases
contingent. (Contingency does not of itself, of course, constitute
freedom, but conjoined with the characteristics of rationality and
spontaneity, does so.)
Necessity, in short, is based upon the principle of logical
contradiction; contingency upon that of sufficient reason. Since our
actions are in no case necessitated in such a way that their opposite
is self-contradictory, or, put positively, since our actions are always
determined by the choice of that which seems best, our actions are
contingent. Occasionally Leibniz puts the matter in a much simpler way,
and one which brings out the essential element more clearly than the
foregoing distinction. Some facts are determined by the principle of
physical causation; others by that of final causation. Some, in other
words, are necessary as the mechanical outcome of their antecedents;
others are necessary as involved in the reaching of a given end. It is
simply the Aristotelian distinction between efficient and teleological
causation. Human action is determined, since it always has a motive or
reason; it is contingent, because it springs from this reason and not
from its temporal antecedents. It is, in short, determined, but it is
also free.
It does not require much analysis, however, to see that this
distinction, in whatever way it be put, really has no significance,
except as it points to the other marks of freedom,--spontaneity
and rationality. As we shall see, Leibniz makes and can make
no absolute distinction between truths of reason and truths of
fact. The contingent and the necessary are one at bottom. To us
with our limited intelligence it does indeed often appear as if no
contradiction were involved in the former,--as if, for example, a man
could turn either to right or left without there being any logical
contradiction in either case; but this is because of our defective
insight. An intelligence cognizant of the whole matter could see that
one action would contradict some truth involved in the constitution
of the universe. The source of the contingent and changing is in the
necessary and eternal. Thus it is that although Leibniz at one time
says that "neither one's self nor any other spirit more enlightened
could demonstrate that the opposite of a given action (like going out
in preference to staying in) involves contradiction," at another time
he says that "a perfect knowledge of all the circumstances, internal
and external, would enable any one to foresee" the decision in a given
case. If that be so, any other action must be impossible; that is,
according to Leibniz's invariable logic, imply contradiction.
We get the same result if we consider the relation of final and
efficient causes. It is only when speaking in a very general way that
Leibniz opposes action as determined by precedent activities to that
directed towards the attainment of an end. He does not really mean
that _some_ action is physical, while _other_ is teleological. He
cannot suppose that some action has an antecedent cause, while other
has a purpose. The very essence of his thought is that action is
both mechanical and teleological; that all action follows in a law of
order from precedent action, and that all fulfils a certain spiritual
function. The distinction is not, with Leibniz, one between two kinds
of action, but between two ways of looking at every action. The desire
to go rather than to stay, has its efficient cause; the movements by
which the desire is executed, have their final cause. The truth of
the matter seems to be
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