Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“ This principle of choice without cause or reason, of a choice, I say, divested of the aim of wisdom and goodness, is regarded by many as the great privilege of God and of intelligent substances, and as the source of their freedom, their satisfaction, their morality and their good or evil. The fantasy of a power to declare one's independence, not only of inclination, but of reason itself within and of good and evil without, is sometimes painted in such fine colours that one might take it to be the most excellent thing in the world. ”

“ To say that one cannot do a thing, simply because one does not will it, is to misuse terms. The wise mind wills only the good: is it then a servitude when the will acts in accordance with wisdom? And can one be less a slave than to act by one's own choice in accordance with the most perfect reason? Aristotle used to say that that man is in a natural servitude (natura servus) who lacks guidance, who has need of being directed. Slavery comes from without, it leads to that which offends, and especially to that which offends with reason: the force of others and our own passions enslave us. ”

“ I call 'World' the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe. And even though one should fill all times and all places, it still remains true that one might have filled them in innumerable ways, and that there is an infinitude of possible worlds among which God must needs have chosen the best, since he does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason. ”

“ By this false idea of an indifference of equipoise the Molinists were much embarrassed. They were asked not only how it was possible to know in what direction a cause absolutely indeterminate would be determined, but also how it was possible that there should finally result therefrom a determination for which there is no source: to say with Molina that it is the privilege of the free cause is to say nothing, but simply to grant that cause the privilege of being chimerical. It is pleasing to see their harassed efforts to emerge from a labyrinth whence there is absolutely no means of egress. ”

“ Should God, after having made free causes and necessary causes, in a mixture infinitely well fitted to show forth the wonders of his infinite wisdom, have established laws consistent with the nature of free causes, but so lacking in firmness that the slightest trouble that came upon a man would overthrow them entirely, to the ruin of human freedom? A mere city governor will become an object of ridicule if he changes his regulations and orders as often as someone is pleased to murmur against him. ”

“ If one answers yes, one plunges into an insane labyrinth: for, as man's soul is an immaterial substance, one will be bound to say that the local movement of certain bodies is an efficient cause of the thoughts in a mind, a statement contrary to the most obvious notions that philosophy imparts to us. If one answers no, one will be constrained to admit that the influence of our organs upon our thoughts depends neither upon the internal qualities of matter, nor upon the laws of motion, but upon an arbitrary institution of the creator. ”

“ Yet a slave, slave as he is, nevertheless has freedom to choose according to the state wherein he is, although more often than not he is under the stern necessity of choosing between two evils, because a superior force prevents him from attaining the goods whereto he aspires. That which in a slave is effected by bonds and constraint in us is effected by passions, whose violence is sweet, but none the less pernicious. In truth we will only that which pleases us: but unhappily what pleases us now is often a real evil, which would displease us if we had the eyes of the understanding open. ”

“ The decree to create is free: God is prompted to all good; the good, and even the best, inclines him to act; but it does not compel him, for his choice creates no impossibility in that which is distinct from the best; it causes no implication of contradiction in that which God refrains from doing. There is therefore in God a freedom that is exempt not only from constraint but also from necessity. I mean this in respect of metaphysical necessity; for it is a moral necessity that the wisest should be bound to choose the best. It is the same with the means which God chooses to attain his glory. ”

“ The practices of virtue, as well as those of vice, may be the effect of a mere habit, one may acquire a taste for them; but when virtue is reasonable, when it is related to God, who is the supreme reason of things, it is founded on knowledge. One cannot love God without knowing his perfections, and this knowledge contains the principles of true piety. The purpose of religion should be to imprint these principles upon our souls: but in some strange way it has happened all too often that men, that teachers of religion have strayed far from this purpose. ”

“ Complete indifference is of this nature: to concede it to the will is to grant it a privilege of the kind that some Cartesians and some mystics find in the divine nature, of being able to do the impossible, to produce absurdities, to cause two contradictory propositions to be true simultaneously. To claim that a determination comes from a complete indifference absolutely indeterminate is to claim that it comes naturally from nothing. ”

“ In truth, the external actions that do not exceed our powers depend absolutely upon our will; but our volitions depend upon our will only through certain artful twists which give us means of suspending our resolutions, or of changing them. We are masters in our own house, not as God is in the world, he having but to speak, but as a wise prince is in his dominions or as a good father of a family is in his home. M. Bayle sometimes takes the matter differently, as though we must have, in order to boast of a free will, an absolute power over ourselves, independent of reasons and of means. ”

“ Wait until you know more of the world and consider therein especially the parts which present a complete whole (as do organic bodies) ; and you will find there a contrivance and a beauty transcending all imagination. Let us thence draw conclusions as to the wisdom and the goodness of the author of things, even in things that we know not. We find in the universe some things which are not pleasing to us; but let us be aware that it is not made for us alone. It is nevertheless made for us if we are wise: it will serve us if we use it for our service ”

“ For the soul does not experience itself as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of the body.
Such questions rose thick and fast in the minds of the seventeenth-century philosophers. It will cause us no great surprise that Leibniz should have quickly felt that the Formal Principle of Aristotle and of the Scholastic philosophy must be by hook or by crook reintroduced—not as the detested substantial form, but under a name by which it might hope to smell more sweet, entelechy. ”

“ A young man will have been delighted by the applause which has been showered upon him after some successful public action; the impression of this great pleasure will have made him remarkably sensitive to reputation; he will think day and night of nothing save what nourishes this passion, and that will cause him to scorn death itself in order to attain his end. For although he may know very well that he will not feel what is said of him after his death, the representation he makes of it for himself beforehand creates a strong impression on his mind. ”

“ But it is very true also that the thing is impossible, when it is taken strictly in accordance with the assumption. As soon as one tries to give an example of it one misses one's aim and stumbles upon the case of a man who, while he does not come to a decision without cause, does so rather under the influence of inclination or passion than of judgement. As soon as one says: 'I scorn the judgements of my reason simply from considerations of my own good pleasure, it pleases me to behave thus', it is as if one were to say: I prefer my inclination to my interest, my pleasure to my profit. ”

“ It is clear that Jesus Christ, completing what Moses had begun, wished that the Divinity should be the object not only of our fear and veneration but also of our love and devotion. Thus he made men happy by anticipation, and gave them here on earth a foretaste of future felicity. For there is nothing so agreeable as loving that which is worthy of love. Love is that mental state which makes us take pleasure in the perfections of the object of our love, and there is nothing more perfect than God, nor any greater delight than in him. ”

“ It is no small thing to be content with God and with the universe, not to fear what destiny has in store for us, nor to complain of what befalls us. Acquaintance with true principles gives us this advantage, quite other than that the Stoics and the Epicureans derived from their philosophy. There is as much difference [283] between true morality and theirs as there is between joy and patience: for their tranquillity was founded only on necessity, while ours must rest upon the perfection and beauty of things, upon our own happiness. ”

“ It is true that they are not inactive or negligent when obvious perils or great and manifest hopes present themselves; for they will not fail to abandon a house that is about to fall and to turn aside from a precipice they see in their path; and they will burrow in the earth to dig up a treasure half uncovered, without waiting for fate to finish dislodging it. But when the good or the evil is remote and uncertain and the remedy painful or little to our taste, the lazy reason seems to us to be valid. ”

“ For if justice was established arbitrarily and without any cause, if God came upon it by a kind of hazard, as when one draws lots, his goodness and his wisdom are not manifested in it, and there is nothing at all to attach him to it. If it is by a purely arbitrary decree, without any reason, that he has established or created what we call justice and goodness, then he can annul them or change their nature. Thus one would have no reason to assume that he will observe them always, as it would be possible to say he will observe them on the assumption that they are founded on reasons. ”

“ Is it to be desired that God should not be bound to be perfect and happy? Is our condition, which renders us liable to fail, worth envying? And should we not be well pleased to exchange it for sinlessness, if that depended upon us? One must be indeed weary of life to desire the freedom to destroy oneself and to pity the Divinity for not having that freedom. M. Bayle himself reasons thus elsewhere against those who laud to the skies an extravagant freedom which they assume in the will, when they would make the will independent of reason. ”

“ But he was incapable of looking at the objects of any special enquiry without seeing them as aspects or parts of one intelligible universe. He strove constantly after system, and the instrument on which his effort relied was the speculative reason. He embodied in an extreme form the spirit of his age. Nothing could be less like the spirit of ours. To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. ”

“ You would not dare to deny that these truths impose upon man a duty in relation to all acts which are in conformity with strict reason, such as these: one must esteem all that is estimable; render good for good; do wrong to no man; honour one's father; render to every man that which is his due, etc. Now since by the very nature of things, and before the divine laws, the truths of morality impose upon man certain duties, Thomas Aquinas and Grotius were justified in saying that if there were no God we should nevertheless be obliged to conform to natural law. ”

“ Let the world be made up of a plurality of agents in a 'loose' order, with room to manoeuvre and to adjust themselves to one another. Then, by good luck or good management, through friction and disaster, by trial and error, by accident or invention, they may work out for themselves a harmony of action. There is no need for divine preordaining here. But on Leibniz's view what the monads do is to represent, and what they are is representation; there is no ultimate distinction between what they are and what they do: all that they do belongs to what they are. ”

“ It is true that all this struggle can only be ideal, that is to say, it can only be a conflict of reasons in the most perfect understanding, which cannot fail to act in the most perfect way, and consequently to choose the best. Yet God is bound by a moral necessity, to make things in such a manner that there can be nothing better: otherwise not only would others have cause to criticize what he makes, but, more than that, he would not himself be satisfied with his work, he would blame himself for its imperfection; and that conflicts with the supreme felicity of the divine nature. ”

“ All these outward forms would be commendable if those who invented them had rendered them appropriate to maintain and to express that which they imitate—if religious ceremonies, ecclesiastical discipline, the rules of communities, human laws were always like a hedge round the divine law, to withdraw us from any approach to vice, to inure us to the good and to make us familiar with virtue. That was the aim of Moses and of other good lawgivers, of the wise men who founded religious orders, and above all of Jesus Christ, divine founder of the purest and most enlightened religion. ”

“ Things were carried to excess at times by both sides, whether in their defence of a vague indifference and the granting of too much to man, or in their teaching determinationem ad unum secundum qualitatem actus licet non quoad ejus substantiam, that is to say, a determination to evil in the non-regenerate, as if they did nothing but sin. After all, I think one must not reproach any but the adherents of Hobbes and Spinoza with destroying freedom and contingency; for they think that that which happens is alone possible, and must happen by a brute geometrical necessity. ”

“ Nature had need of animals, plants, inanimate bodies; there are in these creatures, devoid of reason, marvels which serve for exercise of the reason. What would an intelligent creature do if there were no unintelligent things? What would it think of, if there were neither movement, nor matter, nor sense? If it had only distinct thoughts it would be a God, its wisdom would be without bounds: that is one of the results of my meditations. ”