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But it was metaphysically intractable, and the doctrines of infinite and finite substance which it generated furnish a gallery of metaphysical grotesques; unless we are to except Leibniz; his system is, if nothing else, a miracle of ingenuity, and there are moments when we are in danger of believing it.
On Cartesianism and miracle: Cartesianism in the form of occasionalism does involve miracle, for though God is said by it to act according to laws in conforming body and mind to one another, he thereby causes them to act beyond their natural capacities. On the problem, how can the simple act otherwise than uniformly? Leibniz distinguishes: some uniform action is monotonous, but some is not.
'According to M. Leibniz what is active in every substance ought to be reduced to a true unity. Since therefore the body of every man is composed of several substances, each of them ought to have a principle of action really distinct from the principle of each of the others. He will have the action of every principle to be spontaneous.
That of Bonhomme, published at Lyons in 1539, he procured by loan. The celebrated Leibniz began to prepare an edition of Capella in usum Delphini; but his collections being purloined from him, he desisted from his project: it must be owned that the general learning of Leibniz qualified him admirably for such a task.
Leibniz published a reply to Bayle in the Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants for July 1698. As in all his references to Bayle, he is studiously polite and repays compliment for compliment. The following are perhaps the principal points of his answer. Because the state may be a state of change, as in a moving body which, unless hindered, continues to move.
All imaginative metaphysics have a dynamic basis, e.g., the Platonic Ideas, Leibniz' Monadology, the Nature-philosophy of Schelling, Schopenhauer's Will, and Hartmann's Unconscious, the mystics, the systems that assume a world-soul, etc.
Without this one cannot apprehend that the animal can always follow the whole set of the notes appointed him by God. Let us apply this to man's soul. M. Leibniz will have it that it has received not only the power of producing thoughts continually, but also the faculty of following always a certain set of thoughts, which answers the continual changes that happen in the machine of the body.
We are disappointed. Leibniz himself tells us that he was raised in the scholastic teaching. His acquaintance with Descartes's opinions was second-hand, and they were retailed to him only that they might be derided. He agreed, like an amiable youth, with his preceptors.
It may also be said and this is a characteristic which is not merely negative that all forms of Idealism agree in ascribing special significance to the moral and religious aspects of life. This holds true of the great idealists, different as their types of thought may be of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Leibniz, of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
In particular, he picked out the Aristotelian "entelechy" to stop a gap in the philosophy of his own age. What this form of statement ignores is that Leibniz was a scholastic: a scholastic endeavouring, like Descartes before him, to revolutionize scholasticism.
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