William Ritchie Sorley

“ This is Leibnitz’s famous doctrine of pre-established harmony, in virtue of which the infinitely numerous independent substances of which the world is composed are related to each other and form one universe. It is essential to notice that it proceeds from the very nature of the monads as percipient, self-acting beings, and not from an arbitrary determination of the Deity. ”

“ The will is an effort or tendency to that which one finds good (p. 251) , and is free only in the sense of being exempt from external control [19] (pp. 262, 513, 521) , for it must always have a sufficient reason for its action determined by what seems good to it. The end determining the will is pleasure (p. 269) , and pleasure is the sense of an increase of perfection (p. 670) . A will guided by reason will sacrifice transitory and pursue constant pleasures or happiness, and in this weighing of pleasures consists true wisdom. ”

“ Natural law rises from the strict command to avoid offence, through the maxim of equity which gives to each his due, to that of probity or piety (honeste vivere) ,—the highest ethical perfection,—which presupposes a belief in God, providence and a future life. [21] Moral immortality—not merely the simple continuity which belongs to every monad—comes from God having provided that the changes of matter will not make man lose his individuality (pp. 126, 466) .
Leibnitz thus makes the existence of God a postulate of morality as well as necessary for the realization of the monads. ”

“ Each soul or entelechy is surrounded by an infinite number of monads forming its body (p. 714) ; soul and body together make a living being, and, as their laws are in perfect harmony—a harmony established between the whole realm of final causes and that of efficient causes (p. 714) —we have the same result as if one influenced the other. This is further explained by Leibnitz in his well-known illustration of the different ways in which two clocks may keep exactly the same time. ”

“ The first way represents the common (Locke’s) theory of mutual influence, the second the method of the occasionalists, the third that of pre-established harmony. Thus the body does not act on the soul in the production of cognition, nor the soul on the body in the production of motion. The body acts just as if it had no soul, the soul as if it had no body (p. 711) . Instead, therefore, of all knowledge coming to us directly or indirectly through the bodily senses, it is all developed by the soul’s own activity, and sensuous perception is itself but a confused kind of cognition. ”

“ The ultimate elements of the universe are, according to Leibnitz, individual centres of force or monads. Why they should be individual, and not manifestations of one world-force, he never clearly proves. [13] His doctrine of individuality seems to have been arrived at, not by strict deduction from the nature of force, but rather from the empirical observation that it is by the manifestation of its activity that the separate existence of the individual becomes evident; for his system individuality is as fundamental as activity. ”

“ Body is thus active extension (pp. 110, 111) . The unity of the aggregate depends entirely on our perceiving the monads composing it together. There is no such thing as an absolute vacuum or empty space, any more than there are indivisible material units or atoms from which all things are built up (pp. 126, 186, 277) . Body, corporeal mass, or, as Leibnitz calls it, to distinguish it from the materia prima of which every monad partakes (p. 440) , materia secunda, is thus only a “phenomenon bene fundatum” (p. 436) . ”

“ To this art of orderly combination Leibnitz attached the greatest importance, and to it one of his earliest writings was devoted. Similarly, in the sphere of experience, it is the business of the art of discovery to find out and classify the primitive facts or data, referring every other fact to them as its sufficient reason, so that new truths of experience may be brought to light.
As the perception of the monad when clarified becomes thought, so the appetite of which all monads partake is raised to will, their spontaneity to freedom, in man (p. 669) . ”

“ The primitive truths of fact are, as Descartes held, those of internal experience, and the derivative truths are inferred from them in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, by their agreement with our perception of the world as a whole. They are thus reached by probable arguments—a department of logic which Leibnitz was the first to bring into prominence (pp. 84, 164, 168, 169, 343) . The primitive truths of reasoning are identical (in later terminology, analytical) propositions, the derivative truths being deduced from them by the principle of contradiction. ”

“ God alone, the purely active monad, has an a priori knowledge of the latter class of truths; they have their source in the human mind only in so far as it mirrors the outer world, i.e. in its passivity, whereas the truths of reason have their source in our mind in itself or in its activity. ”

“ Further, since all substances are of the nature of force, it follows that—“in imitation of the notion which we have of souls”—they must contain something analogous to feeling and appetite. It is the nature of the monad to represent the many in one, and this is perception, by which external events are mirrored internally (p. 438) . Through their own activity the monads mirror the universe (p. 725) , but each in its own way and from its own point of view, that is, with a more or less perfect perception (p. 127) ”

“ Substance, the ultimate reality, can only be conceived as force. Hence Leibnitz’s metaphysical view of the monads as simple, percipient, self-active beings, the constituent elements of all things, his physical doctrines of the reality and constancy of force at the same time that space, matter and motion are merely phenomenal, and his psychological conception of the continuity and development of consciousness. ”

“ Bodies, too, like the monads, are self-contained activities, receiving no impulse from without—it is only by an accommodation to ordinary language that we speak of them as doing so—but moving themselves in harmony with each other (p. 250) .
The psychology of Leibnitz is chiefly developed in the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, written in answer to Locke’s famous Essay, and criticizing it chapter by chapter. ”

“ Philosophy.—The central point in the philosophy of Leibnitz was only arrived at after many advances and corrections in his opinions. This point is his new doctrine of substance (p. 702) , [12] and it is through it that unity is given to the succession of occasional writings, scattered over fifty years, in which he explained his views. More inclined to agree than to differ with what he read (p. 425) , and borrowing from almost every philosophical system, his own standpoint is yet most closely related to that of Descartes, partly as consequence, partly by way of opposition. ”

“ The positive properties or perfections of the monads, Leibnitz holds, exist eminenter, i.e. without the limitation that attaches to created monads (p. 716) , in God—their perception as His wisdom or intellect, and their appetite as His absolute will or goodness (p. 654) ; while the absence of all limitation is the divine independence or power, which again consists in this, that the possibility of things depends on His intellect, their reality on His will (p. 506) . The universe in its harmonious order is thus the realization of the divine end, and as such must be the best possible (p. 506) . ”

“ Yet these qualities of bodies, he argues in 1668 (in an essay published without his knowledge under the title Confessio naturae contra atheistas) , require an incorporeal principle, or God, for their ultimate explanation. He also wrote at this time a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against Wissowatius (1669) , and an essay on philosophic style, introductory to an edition of the Antibarbarus of Nizolius (1670) . Clearness and distinctness alone, he says, are what makes a philosophic style, and no language is better suited for this popular exposition than the German. ”

“ The machinery of the one may actually move that of the other, or whenever one moves the mechanician may make a similar alteration in the other, or they may have been so perfectly constructed at first as to continue to correspond at every instant without any further influence (pp. 133, 134) . ”

“ In 1692 the duke of Hanover was made elector. Before, and with a view to this, Leibnitz had been employed by him to write the history of the Brunswick-Lüneburg family, and, to collect material for his history, had undertaken a journey through Germany and Italy in 1687–1690, visiting and examining the records in Marburg, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Munich, Vienna (where he remained nine months) , Venice, Modena and Rome. At Rome he was offered the custodianship of the Vatican library on condition of his joining the Catholic Church. ”

“ This machine was exhibited to the Academy of Paris and to the Royal Society of London, and Leibnitz was elected a fellow of the latter society in April 1673. [6] In January of this year he had gone to London as an attaché on a political mission from the elector of Mainz, returning in March to Paris, and while in London had become personally acquainted with Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, with whom he had already corresponded, with Boyle the chemist and Pell the mathematician. ”

“ The best biography is that of G. E. Guhrauer, G. W. Freiherr von Leibnitz (2 vols., Breslau, 1842; Nachträge, Breslau, 1846) . A shorter Life of G. W. von Leibnitz, on the Basis of the German Work of Guhrauer, has been published by J. M. Mackie (Boston, 1845) . More recent works are those of L. Grote, Leibniz und seine Zeit (Hanover, 1869) ; E. Pfleiderer, Leibniz als Patriot, Staatsmann, und Bildungsträger (Leipzig, 1870) ; the slighter volume of F. Kirchner, G. W. Leibniz: sein Leben und Denken (Köthen, 1876) ; Kuno Fischer, vol. iii. in Gesch. der neuern Philosophie (4th ed., 1902) . ”

“ Philosophy, vol. i. correspondence with Arnauld, &c., ed. C. L. Grotefend; 3rd ser. Mathematics, 7 vols., ed. C. J. Gerhardt) ; (3) Foucher de Careil (planned in 20 vols., 7 published, Paris, 1859–1875) , the same editor having previously published Lettres et opuscules inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1854–1857) ; (4) Onno Klopp, Die Werke von Leibniz gemäss seinem Handschriftlichen Nachlasse in der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover (1st series, Historico-Political and Political, 10 vols., 1864–1877) . The Œuvres de Leibnitz, by A. Jacques (2 vols., Paris, 1846) also deserves mention. ”

“ K. Sächs. Gesells. d. Wiss., vol. iv. (Leipzig, 1865) ; G. Class, Die metaph. Voraussetzungen des Leibnitzischen Determinismus (Tübingen, 1874) ; F. B. Květ, Leibnitzens Logik (Prague, 1857) ; the essays on Leibnitz in Trendelenburg’s Beiträge, vols. ii. and iii. (Berlin, 1855, 1867) ; L. Neff, Leibniz als Sprachforscher (Heidelberg, 1870–1871) ; J. Schmidt, Leibniz und Baumgarten (Halle, 1875) ; D. Nolen, La Critique de Kant et la Métaphysique de Leibniz (Paris, 1875) ; and the exhaustive work of A. Pichler, Die Theologie des Leibniz (Munich, 1869–1870) . ”