John Dewey

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In him alone are understanding and will wholly one. In him the true and the good are one; while every created intelligence is subject in some degree to sensuous affection, to passion. “In us, besides the judgment of the understanding, there is always mixed some unreal idea of the sensation which gives birth to passions and impulses, and these traverse the judgment of the practical understanding.” Freedom, in fine, is not a ready made garment with which all men are clothed to do with as they will. ”

“ 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 ”

“ For extension is nothing but a repetition or continued multiplication of that which is spread out,—it is a plurality, a continuity, a co-existence of parts. Consequently, extension does not suffice to explain the nature of the repeated or manifold substance, of which the notion is anterior to that of its repetition.” Extension, in other words, is nothing substantial, it is not something which can exist by itself; it is only a quality, a property, a mode of being. ”

“ If matter be conceived, not as implied in the relations by which reason is realized in constituting the universe, but as itself differing from reason only in degree, it is impossible to account for its existence. Why should a less degree of perfection exist than is necessary? Why should not the perfect activity, God, complete the universe in himself? Leibniz’s answer that an infinity of monads multiplies his existence so far as possible, may hold indeed of other spirits, who mirror him and live in one divine society, but is utterly inapplicable to those which fail to image him. ”

“ There is something more in the rational soul, or spirit, than there is in the monad or even in the simple soul. Spirit is not only a mirror of the universe of creatures, but is also an image of the divine being. Spirit not only has a perception of the works of God, but is also capable of producing something which resembles them, though on a small scale. To say nothing of dreams, in which we invent without trouble and without volition things upon which we must reflect a long time in order to discover in our waking state,—to say nothing of this, our soul is architectonic in voluntary actions ”

“ Leibniz culminates his discussion of classification as a method of translating the empirical into the rational, by pointing out that it rests upon the law of continuity; and that this law contains two factors,—one equivalent to the axiom of the Realists, that nature is nowhere empty; the other, to that of the Nominalists, that nature does nothing uselessly. “One of these principles seems to make nature a prodigal, the other a miser; and yet both are true if properly understood,” says Leibniz. “Nature is like a good manager, sparing where it is necessary, in order to be magnificent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leibniz never worked out either his ethics or his political philosophy in detail; but it is evident that they both take their origin and find their scope in the fact of man’s relationship to God, that they are both, in fact, accounts of the methods of realizing a universal but not a merely formal harmony. For harmony is not, with Leibniz, an external arrangement, but is the very soul of being. Perfect harmony, or adaptation to the universe of relations, is the end of the individual, and man is informed of his progress toward this end by an inner sentiment of pleasure. ”

“ Sensation is on the side of intelligence what matter is on the side of reality. It is confused knowledge, as matter is imperfect activity or reality. Knowledge is perfect only when it is seen to be necessary, and by “necessary” is meant that whose opposite is impossible, or involves contradiction. In spite, therefore, of Leibniz’s thorough conviction that “matters of fact”—the subject-matter of physical science—are not arbitrary, he is yet obliged finally to agree with Locke that there is no certainty to be found in such knowledge, either as a whole or in any of its details. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Having determined the existence of God, Leibniz states his attributes. These may be reduced to three. He is perfect in power, in wisdom, and in goodness. “Perfection is nothing other than the whole of positive reality separated from the limits and bounds of things. Where there are no limits, as in God, perfection is absolutely infinite.” “In God exists power, which is the source of all knowledge,—which comprehends the realm of ideas, down to its minutest detail,—and will, which directs all creations and changes according to the principle of the best.” ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And as previously we demonstrated a perfect harmony between the two realms of nature,—those of efficient and final causes,—so must we here declare harmony between the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace,—that is, between God as the architect of the mechanical world-structure, and God as the monarch of the world of spirits.” God fulfils his creation, in other words, in a realm of spirits, and fulfils it because here there are beings who do not merely reflect him but who enter into relations of companionship with him, forming a community. ”

“ Their existence, as material, is merely privative; it is merely the absence of the activity found in conscious spirit. How can this deprivation, this limitation, increase in any way the harmony and perfection of the universe? Leibniz’s theory of the negative, in fine, compels him to put nature and spirit on the same level, as differing only in degree. This, so far from giving nature a reality, results in its being swallowed up in spirit, not as necessarily distinct from it and yet one with it, but as absorbed in it, since the apparent difference is only privative. ”

“ Thus when Leibniz compares, as he often does, motives to weights acting upon a balance, we are to remember that the balance is not to be conceived as the soul, and the weights as energies outside it, but that this is only a way of picturing what is going on within the soul itself. The soul may be a mechanism, but it is a self-directing and self-executing mechanism. To say that human action is free because it is spontaneous, is to say that it follows an immanent principle, that it is independent of foreign influences,—in a word, that it is self-determined. ”

“ Again, to both man bears a similar relation to this spiritual reality. In Plato’s words, he participates in the Ideas; in those of Leibniz he reflects, as a mirror, the universe. To both, in a word, the reality, the true-self of the individual, is the spiritual universe of which it is an organic member. To both, therefore, man obtains freedom or self-realization only as he realizes his larger and more comprehensive identity with the Reason of the universe. With both, knowledge is the good, ignorance is the evil. No man is voluntarily bad, but only through lack of knowledge of the true Good. ”

“ 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. ”