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Updated: June 11, 2025
I remember in one of them, especially, his delineation of the characteristics and services of Leibnitz, who was one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and it was perfection in that kind of conversation which is worthy of men claiming to possess immortal souls: for it brought out, especially, examples of Leibnitz's amazing forethought as to European policy, which seemed at times like divinely inspired prophecies.
It is undeniable that English philosophy in Leibnitz's time had the general character which he ascribes to it. The phenomena of nature were held to be resolvable into the attractions and the repulsions of particles of matter; all knowledge was attained through the senses; the mind antecedent to experience was a tabula rasa.
The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits? they are character!
Bouvard smiled from time to time, and renewing the conversation, said: "The fact is, it is hard to avoid doubt; thus, for the existence of God, Descartes', Kant's, and Leibnitz's proofs are not the same, and mutually destroy one another. The creation of the world by atoms, or by a spirit, remains inconceivable.
Be not too much annoyed at being an immortal poet and composer; there is nothing worse in this world to which one should apply the following modified version of Leibnitz's well-known axiom: Tout est pour le mieux, dans un des plus mauvais mondes possible! Alas! I lately again had a great misfortune. One of my few friends, the bravest and most self-sacrificing of all, is dead.
Such at least is the opinion of thinkers to-day, though this mutilation and leveling down of the most daring of Leibnitz's hypotheses was perhaps entirely advantageous for Wolff's impression on his contemporaries; what appeared questionable to him would no doubt have repelled them also.
Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony; which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the inventor too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence.
I will say at once, that, if we had the whole case before us; if we were taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council-chamber of Nature, and were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves, like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of "the best of all possible worlds," nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said." Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind.
Leibnitz's two leading ideas, the theory of monads and the pre-established harmony, were most of all affected by this process of toning down. He limits the application of the pre-established harmony to the relation of body and soul, which to Leibnitz was only a case especially favorable for the illustration of the hypothesis.
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