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Updated: June 10, 2025
To suppose a priori that the whole of the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least that mechanism can give a complete translation of what happens in the world, is to pronounce for a certain metaphysic the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leibniz have laid down the principles and drawn the consequences.
And yet what M. Leibniz supposes about the machine of a human body is more admirable and more surprising than all this. Let us apply his system concerning the union of the soul with the body to the person of Julius Caesar.
To remove the final effect of this objection, Leibniz held out Molanus's first project, that the Lutherans should express a general acquiescence, in the authority of the church, and promise obedience, to the decisions of a General Council, to be called, for the purpose of pronouncing, on these points; and that, in consequence of these advances, on their part, the anathemas of the Council of Trent, should be suspended, and the Lutherans received, provisionally, within the pale, of the Catholic church.
Leibniz wrote two books; a considerable number of articles in learned periodicals; and an enormous number of unpublished notes, papers and letters, preserved in the archives of the Electors of Hanover not because of the philosophical significance of some of them, but because of the political importance of most of them.
Is not Leibniz the victim of a familiar fallacy, that of incompletely stated alternatives? 'Either finite beings interact or else they do not directly condition one another. Monads do not interact, therefore they do not directly condition one another.
But succession remains none the less a mere appearance, as indeed does movement itself. In the doctrine of Leibniz, time is reduced to a confused perception, relative to the human standpoint, a perception which would vanish, like a rising mist, for a mind seated at the centre of things. Yet finalism is not, like mechanism, a doctrine with fixed rigid outlines.
From among this great mass various excerpts of philosophical interest have been made by successive editors of Leibniz's works. It may be that the most profound understanding of his mind is to be derived from some of these pieces, but if we wish to consider the public history of Leibniz, we may set them aside. Of the two books, one was published, and the other never was.
In such choice we freely feel after the shaping of a scheme, we do not arbitrate simply between shaped and given possible schemes. And perhaps some such element enters into all our choices, since our life is to some extent freely designed by ourselves. If so, our minds are even more akin to the divine mind than Leibniz realized.
Leibniz was above all things a metaphysician. That does not mean that his head was in the clouds, or that the particular sciences lacked interest for him. Not at all he felt a lively concern for theological debate, he was a mathematician of the first rank, he made original contributions to physics, he gave a realistic attention to moral psychology.
Leibniz wished to come to the English court of George I, but was unkindly ordered to attend to the duties of his librarianship. So he remained in Hanover. He was then an old man, and before the tide of favour had turned, he died. Posterity has reckoned Locke and Leibniz the heads of rival sects, but politically they were on the same side.
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