philosophic unbelief, turned aside, as we have seen, from the
questions which had occupied his predecessors; knew little and cared
less about substance and accident, matter and spirit; but set
himself to investigate the nature of the organ itself by which truth
is apprehended. In this investigation he began by emptying the mind
of all native elements of knowledge. He repudiated any supposed
dowry of original truths or innate or connate ideas, and endeavored
to show how, by acting on the report of the senses and personal
experience, the understanding arrives at all the ideas of which
it is conscious. The mode of procedure in this case is empiricism;
the result with Locke was sensualism,--more fully developed by
Condillac, [18] in the next century. But the same method may lead, as
in the case of Berkeley, to immaterialism, falsely called idealism.
Or it may lead, as in the case of Helveticus, to materialism. Locke
himself would probably have landed in materialism, had he followed
freely the bent of his own thought, without the restraints of a
cautious temper, and respect for the common and traditional opinion
of his time. The "Essay" discovers an unmistakable leaning in that
direction; as where the author supposes, "We shall never be able to
know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible
for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation,
to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter
fitly disposed a power to perceive and think;... it being, in respect
of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive
that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty
of thinking, since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what
sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power,
which cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure
and bounty of the Creator. For I see no contradiction in it, that
the first thinking eternal Being should, if he pleased, give to
certain systems of created, senseless matter, put together as he
thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought." With
such notions of the nature of thought, as a kind of mechanical
contrivance, that can be conferred outright by an arbitrary act of
Deity, and attached to one nature as well as another, it is evident
that Locke could have had no idea of spirit as conceived by
metaphysicians,--or no belief in that idea, if conceived. And with
such conceptions of Deity and Divine operations, as consisting in
absolute power dissociated from absolute reason, one would not be
surprised to find him asserting, that God, if he pleased, might make
two and two to be one, instead of four,--that mathematical laws are
arbitrary determinations of the Supreme Will,--that a thing is true
only as God wills it to be so,--in fine, that there is no such thing
as absolute truth. The resort to "Omnipotency" in such matters is
more convenient than philosophical; it is a dodging of the question,
instead of an attempt to solve it. Divine ordination--"[Greek: Doz
d' etelevto Bonlae]"--is a maxim which settles all difficulties.
But it also precludes all inquiry. Why speculate at all, with this
universal solvent at hand?
[Footnote 18: _Essai sur l'Origine du Connaissances humaines_. Book
IV. Chap. 3, Sect. 6.]
The "contradiction" which Locke could not see was clearly seen and
keenly felt by Leibnitz. The arbitrary will of God, to him, was no
solution. He believed in necessary truths independent of the Supreme
Will; in other words, he believed that the Supreme Will is but the
organ of the Supreme Reason: "Il ne faut point s'imaginer, que les
vérités éternelles, étant dépendantes de Dieu, sont arbitragés et
dépendent de sa volonté." He felt, with Des Cartes, the incompatibility
of thought with extension, considered as an immanent quality of
substance, and he shared with Spinoza the unific propensity which
distinguishes the higher order of philosophic minds. Dualism was an
offence to him. On the other hand, he differed from Spinoza in his
vivid sense of individuality, of personality. The pantheistic idea
of a single, sole being, of which all other beings are mere
modalities, was also and equally an offence to him. He saw well the
illusoriness and unfruitfulness of such a universe as Spinoza dreamed.
He saw it to be a vain imagination, a dream-world, "without form and
void," nowhere blossoming into reality. The philosophy of Leibnitz
is equally remote from that of Des Cartes on the one hand, and from
that of Spinoza on the other. He diverges from the former on the
question of substance, which Des Cartes conceived as consisting of
two kinds, one active (thinking) and one passive (extended), but
which Leibnitz conceives to be all and only active. He explodes
Dualism, and resolves the antithesis of matter and spirit by
positing extension as a continuous act instead of a passive mode,
substance as an active force instead of an inert mass,--matter as
substance appearing, communicating,--as the necessary band and
relation of spirits among themselves. [19]
[Footnote 19: The following passages may serve as illustrations of
these positions:--
"Materia habet de so actum entitativum."--_De Princip. Indiv_.
Coroll. I.
"Dicam interim notionem virium seu virtutis, (quam Germani vocant
_Kraft_, Galli, _la force_,) cui ego explicandae peculiarem
Dynamices scientiam destinavi, plurimum lucis afferre ad veram
notionem substantiae intelligendam."--_De Primae Philosoph. Emendat,
et de Notione Substantiae_.
"Corpus ergo est agens extensum; dici poterit esse substantiam
extensam, modo teneatur omnem substantiam _agere, at omne agens
substantiam_ appellari." "Patebit non tantum mentes, sed etiam
substantiae omnes in loco, non nisi per _operationem_ esse."--
_De Vera Method. Phil. et Theol_.
"Extensionem concipere ut absolutum ex eo forte oritur quod spatium
concipimus per modum substantiae"--_Ad Des Bosses Ep_. XXIX.
"Car l'étendue ne signifie qu'une répétition ou multiplicité continuée
de ce qui est répandu."--_Extrait d'une Lettre_, etc.
"Et l'on peut dire que Pétunduc est en quelque façon à l'espace
comme la durée est au tems."--_Exam. des Principes de Malebranche_.
"La nature de la substance consistant à mon avis dans cette tendance
réglée de laquelle les phénomènes naissent par ordre."--_Lettre à
M. Bayle_.
"Car rien n'a mieux marqué la substance que la puissance d'agir."--
_Réponse aux Objections du P. Lami_.
"S'il n'y avait que des esprits, ils seraient sans la liaison
nécessaire, sans l'ordre des tems et des lieux."--_Theod_. Sect. 120.]
He parts company with Spinoza on the question of individuality.
Substance is homogeneous; but substances, or beings, are infinite.
Spinoza looked upon the universe and saw in it the undivided
background on which the objects of human consciousness are painted
as momentary pictures. Leibnitz looked and saw that background, like
the background of one of Raphael's Madonnas, instinct with
individual life, and swarming with intelligences which look out from
every point of space. Leibnitz's universe is composed of Monads,
that is, units, individual substances, or entities, having neither
extension, parts, nor figure, and, of course, indivisible. These are
"the veritable atoms of nature, the elements of things."
The Monad is unformed and imperishable; it has no natural end or
beginning. It could begin to be only by creation; it can cease to be
only by annihilation. It cannot be affected from without or changed
in its interior by any other creature. Still, it must have qualities,
without which it would not be an entity. And monads must differ one
from another, or there would be no changes in our experience; since
all that takes place in compound bodies is derived from the simples
which compose them. Moreover, the monad, though uninfluenced from
without, is changing continually; the change proceeds from an
internal principle. Every monad is subject to a multitude of
affections and relations, although without parts. This shifting state,
which represents multitude in unity, is nothing else than what we
call _Perception_, which must be carefully distinguished from
_Apperception_, or consciousness. And the action of the internal
principle which causes change in the monad, or a passing from one
perception to another, is _Appetition_. The desire does not always
attain to the perception to which it tends, but it always effects
something, and causes a change of perceptions.
Leibnitz differs from Locke in maintaining that perception is
inexplicable and inconceivable on mechanical principles. It is
always the act of a simple substance, never of a compound. And
"in simple substances there is nothing but perceptions and their
changes." [20]
[Footnote 20: _Menadol_. 17.]
He differs from Locke, furthermore, on the question of the origin of
ideas. This question, he says, "is not a preliminary one in
philosophy, and one must have made great progress to be able to
grapple successfully with it."--"Meanwhile, I think I may say, that
our ideas, even those of sensible objects, _viennent de nôtre propre
fond_... I am by no means for the _tabula rasa_ of Aristotle; on the
contrary, there is to me something rational (_quelque chose de solide_)
in what Plato called _reminiscence_. Nay, more than that, we have
not only a reminiscence of all our past thoughts, but we have also a
_presentiment_ of all our thoughts." [21]
[Footnote 21: _Reflexions sur l'Essai de l'Entendement humain_.]
Mr. Lewes, in his "Biographical History of Philosophy," speaks of
the essay from which these words are quoted, as written in "a
somewhat supercilious tone." We are unable to detect any such
feature in it. That trait was wholly foreign from Leibnitz's nature.
"Car je suis des plus dociles," he says of himself, in this same
essay. He was the most tolerant of philosophers. "Je ne méprise
presque rien."--"Nemo est ingenio minus quam ego censorio."--
"Mirum dictu: probo pleraque quae lego."--"Non admodum refutationes
quaerere aut legere soleo."
To return to the monads. Each monad, according to Leibnitz, is,
properly speaking, a soul, inasmuch as each is endowed with
perception. But in order to distinguish those which have only
perception from those which have also sentiment and memory, he will
call the latter _souls_, the former _monads_ or _entelechies_. [22]
[Footnote 22: _Entelechy_ ([Greek: entelechia]) is an Aristotelian term,
signifying activity, or more properly perhaps, self action. Leibnitz
understands by it something complete in itself ([Greek: echon to
enteles]). Mr. Butler, in his _History of Ancient Philosophy_,
lately reprinted in this country, translates it "act." _Function_, we
think would be a better rendering. (See W. Archer Butler's _Lectures_,
Last Series, Lect. 2.) Aristotle uses the word as a definition of the
soul. "The soul," he says, "is the first entelechy of an active body."]
The naked monad, he says, has perceptions without relief, or
"enhanced flavor"; it is in a state of stupor. Death, he thinks, may
produce this state for a time in animals. The monads completely fill
the world; there is never and nowhere a void, and never complete
inanimateness and inertness. The universe is a _plenum_ of souls.
Wherever we behold an organic whole, (_unum per se_,) there monads
are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate,
and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection
lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without
a regent, or sentient soul (_unum per accidens_). There can be no
monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without
a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but
also the animal soul. There is no generation out of nothing, and no
absolute death. Birth is expansion, development, growth; and death
is contraction, envelopment, decrease. The monads which are destined
to become human souls have existed from the beginning in organic
matter, but only as sentient or animal souls, without reason. They
remain in this condition until the generation of the human beings to
which they belong, and then develope themselves into rational souls.
The different organs and members of the body are also relatively
souls which collect around them a number of monads for a specific
purpose, and so on _ad infinitum_. Matter is not only infinitely
divisible, but infinitely divided. All matter (so called) is living
and active. "Every particle of matter may be conceived as a garden of
plants, or as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of each plant,
each member of each animal, each drop of their humors, is in turn
another such garden or pond." [23]
[Footnote 23: _Monadol._ 67.]
The connection between monads, consequently the connection between
soul and body, is not composition, but an organic relation,--in some
sort, a spontaneous relation. The soul forms its own body, and
moulds it to its purpose. This hypothesis was afterward embraced and
developed as a physiological principle by Stahl. As all the atoms in
one body are organically related, so all the beings in the universe
are organically related to each other and to the All. One creature,
or one organ of a creature, being given, there is given with it the
world's history from the beginning to the end. _All bodies are
strictly fluid; the universe is in flux_.
The principle of continuity answers the same purpose in Leibnitz's
system that the single substance does in Spinoza's. It vindicates
the essential unity of all being. Yet the two conceptions are
immeasurably different, and constitute an immeasurable difference
between the two systems, considered in their practical and moral
bearings, as well as their ontological aspects. Spinoza [24]
starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which
there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's
system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the
existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the
human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore,
Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute
and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral
result of his system, Godward, is fatalism,--manward, indifferentism
and negation of moral good and evil. Leibnitz ends in theism; the
moral result of his system, Godward, is optimism,--manward, liberty,
personal responsibility, moral obligation.
[Footnote 24: See Helferich's _Spinoza, und Leibnitz_, p. 76.]
He demonstrates the being of God by the necessity of a sufficient
reason to account for the series of things. Each finite thing
requires an antecedent or contingent cause. But the supposition of
an endless sequence of contingent causes, or finite things, is absurd;
the series must have had a beginning, and that beginning cannot have
been a contingent cause or finite thing. "The final reason of things
must be found in a necessary substance in which the detail of
changes exists eminently, (_ne soit qu'éminemment_,) as in its source;
and this is what we call God." [25]
[Footnote 25: _Monadol_. 38.]
The idea of God is of such a nature, that the being corresponding to
it, if possible, must be actual. We have the idea; it involves no
bounds, no negation, consequently no contradiction. It is the idea
of a possible, therefore of an actual.
"God is the primitive Unity, or the simple original Substance of
which all the creatures, or original monads, are the products, and
_are generated, so to speak, by continual fulgurations from moment
to moment, bounded by the receptivity of the creature_, of whose
existence limitation is an essential condition." [26]
[Footnote 26: Ib. 47.]
The philosophic theologian and the Christianizing philosopher will
rejoice to find in this proposition a point of reconciliation between
the extramundane God of pure theism and the cardinal principle of
Spinozism, the immanence of Deity in creation,--a principle as dear
to the philosophic mind as that of the extramundane Divinity is to
the theologian. The universe of Spinoza is a self-existent unit,
divine in itself, but with no Divinity behind it. That of Leibnitz
is an endless series of units from a self-existent and divine source.
The one is an infinite deep, the other an everlasting flood.
The doctrine of the _Preëstablished Harmony_, so intimately and
universally associated with the name of Leibnitz, has found little
favor with his critics, or even with his admirers. Feuerbach calls
it his weak side, and thinks that Leibnitz's philosophy, else so
profound, was here, as in other instances, overshadowed by the
popular creed; that he accommodated himself to theology, as a highly
cultivated and intelligent man, conscious of his superiority,
accommodates himself to a lady in his conversation with her,
translating his ideas into her language, and even paraphrasing them.
From this view of Leibnitz, as implying insincerity, we utterly
dissent. [27]
[Footnote 27: See, in connection with this point, two admirable essays
by Lessing,--the one entitled _Leibnitz on Eternal Punishment_, the
other _Objections of Andreas Wissowatius to the Doctrine of the
Trinity_. Of the latter the real topic is Leibnitz's _Defensio
Trinitatis_. The sharp-sighted Lessing, than whom no one has
expressed a greater reverence for Leibnitz, emphatically asserts and
vigorously defends the philosopher's orthodoxy.]
The author of the "Théodicée" was not more interested in philosophy
than he was in theology. His thoughts and his purpose did equal
justice to both. The deepest wish of his heart was to reconcile them,
not by formal treaty, but in loving and condign union. We do not,
however, object to an esoteric and exoteric view of the doctrine
in question; and we quite agree with Feuerbach that the phrase
_préétablie_ does not express a metaphysical determination.
It is one thing to say, that God, by an arbitrary decree from
everlasting, has so predisposed and predetermined every motion in the
world of matter that each volition of a rational agent finds in the
constant procession of physical forces a concurrent event by which it
is executed, but which would have taken place without his volition,
just as the mail-coach takes our letter, if we have one, but goes
all the same, when we do not write,--this is the gross, exoteric
view,--and a very different thing it is to say, that the monads
composing the human system and the universe of things are so related,
adjusted, accommodated to each other, and to the whole, each being a
representative of all the rest and a mirror of the universe, that each
feels all that passes in the rest, and all conspire in every act, [28]
more or less effectively, in the ratio of their nearness to the prime
agent. This is Leibnitz's idea of preëstablished harmony, which,
perhaps, would be better expressed by the term "necessary consent."
"In the ideas of God, each monad has a right to demand that God, in
regulating the rest from the commencement of things, shall have
regard to it; for since a created monad can have no physical
influence on the interior of another, it is only by this means that
one can be dependent on another."--"The soul follows its own laws
and the body follows its own, and they meet in virtue of the
preëstablished harmony which exists between all substances, as
representatives of one and the same universe. Souls act according to
the laws of final causes by appetitions, etc. Bodies act according to
the laws of efficient causes or the laws of motion. And the two
kingdoms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes,
harmonize with each other." [29]
[Footnote 28: In this connection, Leibnitz quotes the remarkable
saying of Hippocrates, [_Greek: Sumpnoia panta_]. The universe
breathes together, conspires.--_Monadal_. 61.]
[Footnote 29: _Monadol_. 78, 79.]
The Preëstablished Harmony, then, is to be regarded as the
philosophic statement of a fact, and not as a theory concerning the
cause of the fact. But, like all philosophic and adequate statements,
it answers the purpose of a theory, and clears up many difficulties.
It is the best solution we know of the old contradiction of
free-will and fate,--individual liberty and a necessary world. This
antithesis disappears in the light of the Leibnitian philosophy,
which resolves freedom and necessity into different points of
view and different stages of development. The principle of the
Preëstablished Harmony was designed by Leibnitz to meet the
difficulty, started by Des Cartes, of explaining the conformity between
the perceptions of the mind and the corresponding affections of the
body, since mind and matter, in his view, could have no connection
with, or influence on each other. The Cartesians explained this
correspondence by the theory of _occasional causes_, that is, by
the intervention of the Deity, who was supposed by his arbitrary will to
have decreed a certain perception or sensation in the mind to go
with a certain affection of the body, with which, however, it had no
real connection. "Car il" (that is, M. Bayle) "est persuadé avec les
Cartésiens modernes, que les idées des qualités sensibles que Dieu
donne, selon eux, à l'âme, à l'occasion des mouvemens du corps,
n'ont rien qui représente ces mouvemens, ou qui leur ressemble; de
sorte qu'il étoit purement arbitraire que Dieu nous donnât les idées
de la chaleur, du froid, de la lumière et autres que nous
expérimentons, ou qu'il nous en donnât de tout-autres à cette même
occasion." [30]
[Footnote 30: _Théodicée_. Partie II. 340.]
If the body was exposed to the flame, there was no more reason,
according to this theory, why the soul should be conscious of pain
than of pleasure, except that God had so ordained. Such a supposition
was shocking to our philosopher, who could tolerate no arbitrariness
in God and no gap or discrepancy in nature, and who, therefore,
sought to explain, by the nature of the soul itself and its kindred
monads, the correspondence for which so violent an hypothesis was
embraced by the Cartesians.
We have left ourselves no room to speak as we would of Leibnitz as
theosopher. It was in this character that he obtained, in the last
century, his widest fame. The work by which he is most commonly known,
by which alone he is known to many, is the "Théodicée,"--an attempt
to vindicate the goodness of God against the cavils of unbelievers.
He was one of the first to apply to this end the cardinal principle
of the Lutheran Reformation,--the liberty of reason. He was one of
the first to treat unbelief, from the side of religion, as an error
of judgment, not as rebellion against rightful authority. The latter
was and is the Romanist view. The former is the Protestant theory,
but was not then, and is not always now, the Protestant practice.
Theology then was not concerned to vindicate the reason or the
goodness of God. It gloried in his physical strength by which he
would finally crush dissenters from orthodoxy. Leibnitz knew no
authority independent of Reason, and no God but the Supreme Reason
directing Almighty Good-will. The philosophic conclusion justly
deducible from this view of God, let cavillers say what they will,
is Optimism. Accordingly, Optimism, or the doctrine of the best
possible world, is the theory of the "Théodicée." Our limits will
not permit us to analyze the argument of this remarkable work. Bunsen
says, "It necessarily failed because it was a not quite honest
compound of speculation and divinity." [31]
[Footnote 31: _Outlines of the Philos. of Univ. Hist_. Vol. I. Chap. 6.]