Este—were not only preceded by an immense collection of
historical sources, but enabled him to publish materials for a
code of international law.[1] The history of Brunswick itself was
the last work of his life, and had covered the period from 768
to 1005 when death ended his labours. But the government,
in whose service and at whose order the work had been carried
out, left it in the archives of the Hanover library till it was
published by Pertz in 1843.
It was in the years between 1690 and 1716 that Leibnitz’s chief philosophical works were composed, and during the first ten of these years the accounts of his system were, for the most part, preliminary sketches. Indeed, he never gave a full and systematic account of his doctrines. His views have to be gathered from letters to friends, from occasional articles in the Acta Eruditorum, the Journal des Savants, and other journals, and from one or two more extensive works. It is evident, however, that philosophy had not been entirely neglected in the years in which his pen was almost solely occupied with other matters. A letter to the duke of Brunswick, and another to Arnauld, in 1671, show that he had already reached his new notion of substance; but it is in the correspondence with Antoine Arnauld, between 1686 and 1690, that his fundamental ideas and the reasons for them are for the first time made clear. The appearance of Locke’s Essay in 1690 induced him (1696) to note down his objections to it, and his own ideas on the same subjects. In 1703–1704 these were worked out in detail and ready for publication, when the death of the author whom they criticized prevented their appearance (first published by Raspe, 1765). In 1710 appeared the only complete and systematic philosophical work of his life-time, Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme, et l’origine du mal, originally undertaken at the request of the late queen of Prussia, who had wished a reply to Bayle’s opposition of faith and reason. In 1714 he wrote, for Prince Eugene of Savoy, a sketch of his system under the title of La Monadologie, and in the same year appeared his Principes de la nature et de la grâce. The last few years of his life were perhaps more occupied with correspondence than any others, and, in a philosophical regard, were chiefly notable for the letters, which, through the desire of the new queen of England, he interchanged with Clarke, sur Dieu, l’âme, l’espace, la durée.
Leibnitz died on the 14th of November 1716, his closing years enfeebled by disease, harassed by controversy, embittered by neglect; but to the last he preserved the indomitable energy and power of work to which is largely due the position he holds as, more perhaps than any one in modern times, a man of almost universal attainments and almost universal genius. Neither at Berlin, in the academy which he had founded, nor in London, whither his sovereign had gone to rule, was any notice taken of his death. At Hanover, Eckhart, his secretary, was his only mourner; “he was buried,” says an eyewitness, “more like a robber than what he really was, the ornament of his country.”[2] Only in the French Academy was the loss recognized, and a worthy eulogium devoted to his memory (November 13, 1717). The 200th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in 1846, and in the same year were opened the Königlichsächsische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften and the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Leipzig and Vienna respectively. In 1883, a statue was erected to him at Leipzig.
Leibnitz possessed a wonderful power of rapid and continuous work. Even in travelling his time was employed in solving mathematical problems. He is described as moderate in his habits, quick of temper but easily appeased, charitable in his judgments of others, and tolerant of differences of opinion, though impatient of contradiction on small matters. He is also said to have been fond of money to the point of covetousness; he was certainly desirous of honour, and felt keenly the neglect in which his last years were passed.
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),[3] 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. Cartesianism, Leibnitz often asserted, is the ante-room of truth, but the ante-room only. Descartes’s separation of things into two heterogeneous substances only connected by the omnipotence of God, and the more logical absorption of both by Spinoza into the one divine substance, followed from an erroneous conception of what the true nature of substance is. 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. In the closest connexion with the same stand his logical principles of consistency and sufficient reason, and the method he developed from them, his ethical end of perfection, and his crowning theological conception of the universe as the best possible world, and of God both as its efficient cause and its final harmony.
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.[4] 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. “The monads,” he says, “are the very atoms of nature—in a word, the elements of things,” but, as centres of force, they have neither parts, extension nor figure (p. 705). Hence their distinction from the atoms of Democritus and the materialists. They are metaphysical points or rather spiritual beings whose very nature it is to act. As the bent bow springs back of itself, so the monads naturally pass and are always passing into action without any aid but the absence of opposition (p. 122). Nor do they, like the atoms, act upon one another (p. 680); the action of each excludes that of every other. The activity of each is the result of its own past state, the determinator of its own future (pp. 706, 722). “The monads have no windows by which anything may go in or out” (p. 705).
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); for the Cartesians were wrong in ignoring the infinite grades of perception, and identifying it with the reflex cognizance of it which may be called apperception. Every monad is thus a microcosm, the universe in little,[5] and according to the degree of its activity is the distinctness of its representation of the universe (p. 709). Thus Leibnitz, borrowing the Aristotelian term, calls the monads entelechies, because they have a certain perfection (τὸ ἐντελές) and sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια) which make them sources of their internal actions and, so to speak, incorporeal automata (p. 706). That the monads are not pure entelechies is shown by the differences amongst them. Excluding all external limitation, they are yet limited by their own nature. All created monads contain a passive element or materia prima (pp. 440, 687, 725), in virtue of which their perceptions are more or less confused. As the activity of the monad consists in perception, this is inhibited by the passive principle, so that there arises in the monad an appetite or tendency to overcome the inhibition and become more perceptive, whence follows the change from one perception to another (pp. 706, 714). By the proportion of activity to passivity in it one monad is differentiated from another. The greater the amount of activity or of distinct perceptions the more perfect is the monad; the stronger the element of passivity, the more confused its perceptions, the less perfect is it (p. 709). The soul would be a divinity had it nothing but distinct perceptions (p. 520).
The monad is never without a perception; but, when it has a number of little perceptions with no means of distinction, a state similar to that of being stunned ensues, the monade nue being perpetually in this state (p. 707). Between this and the most distinct perception there is room for an infinite diversity of nature among the monads themselves. Thus no one monad is exactly the same as another; for, were it possible that there should be two identical, there would be no sufficient reason why God, who brings them into
- ↑ Codex juris gentium diplomaticus (1693); Mantissa codicis juri gentium diplomatici (1700).
- ↑ Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland, by himself (1726), i. 118.
- ↑ When not otherwise stated, the references are to Erdmann’s edition of the Opera philosophica.
- ↑ See Considérations sur la doctrine d’un esprit universel (1702).
- ↑ Cf. Opera, ed. Dutens, II. ii. 20.
