scholastic one. Complaint was made to the guardians of the orphan Gottfried of these illicit visits to the tree of knowledge. Severe prohibitory measures were recommended, which, however, judicious counsel from another quarter happily averted.
At the age of eleven, Leibnitz records, that he made, on one occasion, three hundred Latin verses without elision between breakfast and dinner. A hundred hexameters, or fifty distichs, in a day, is generally considered a fair pensum for a boy of sixteen at a German gymnasium.
At the age of seventeen, he produced, as an academic exercise, on taking the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, his celebrated treatise on the Principle of Individuality, "De Principle Individui," the most extraordinary performance ever achieved by a youth of that age,— remarkable for its erudition, especially its intimate knowledge of the writings of the Schoolmen, and equally remarkable for its vigorous grasp of thought and its subtile analysis. In this essay Leibnitz discovered the bent of his mind and prefigured his future philosophy, in the choice of his theme, and in his vivid appreciation and strenuous positing of the individual as the fundamental principle of ontology. He takes Nominalistic ground in relation to the old controversy of Nominalist and Realist, siding with Abelard and Roscellin and Occam, and against St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. The principle of individuation, he maintains, is the entire entity of the individual, and not mere limitation of the universal, whether by "Existence" or by "Haecceity."[1] John and Thomas are individuals by virtue of their integral humanity, and not by fractional limitation of humanity. Dobbin is an actual positive horse (Entitas tota). Not a negation, by limitation, of universal equiety (Negatio). Not an individuation, by actual existence, of a non-existent but essential and universal horse (Existentia). Nor yet a horse only by limitation of kind,—a horse minus Dick and Bessie and the brown mare, etc. (Haecceitas). But an individual horse, simply by virtue of his equine nature. Only so far as he is an actual complete horse, is he an individual at all. (Per quod quid est, per id unum numero est.) His individuality is nothing superadded to his equiety. (Unum supra ens nihil addit reale.) Neither is it anything subtracted therefrom. (Negatio non potest producere accidentia individualia.) In fine, there is and can be no horse but actual individual horses. (Essentia et existentia non possunt separari.)
This was the doctrine of the Nominalists, as it was of Aristotle before them. It was the doctrine of the Reformers, except, if we remember rightly, of Huss. The University of Leipzig was founded upon it. It is the current doctrine of the present day, and harmonizes well with the current Materialism. Not that Nominalism in itself, and as Leibnitz held it, is necessarily materialistic, but Realism is essentially antimaterialistic. The Realists held with Plato,—but not in his name, for they, too, claimed to be Aristotelian, and preëminently so,—that the ideal must precede the actual. So far they were right. This was their strong point. Their error lay in claiming for the ideal an objective reality, an independent being. Conceptualism was only another statement of Nominalism, or, at most, a question of the relation of language to thought. It cannot be regarded as a third issue in this controversy,— a controversy in which more time was consumed, says John of Salisbury, "than the Caesars required to make themselves masters of the world," and in which the combatants, having spent at last their whole stock of dialectic ammunition, resorted to carnal weapons, passing suddenly, by a very illogical metabasis, from "universals" to particulars.
- ↑ "Aut enim principium individuationis ponitur entitas tota, (1) aut non tota. Non totam aut negatio exprimit, (2) aut aliquid positivum. Positivum aut pars physica est, essentiam terminaus, existentia, (3) aut metaphysica, speciem terminans, haec ceitas. (4). . . Pono igitur: omne individuum sua totaentitate individuatur."—De Princ. Indiv. 3 et 4.
