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Updated: June 10, 2025
The philosophic value of the interpretation of Experience by the blind ought therefore to be very great. Observations made on the experiences of the blind and of those to whom vision has been restored are not very numerous, but many of these recorded by Plainer, the friend of Leibniz, and others are of the highest value, and remarkably confirm the view for which we have been contending.
Unfortunately, the business took, another direction: Leibniz proclaimed, that after every possible explanation should be given, the Lutheran church would, still retain, some articles, contrary to the defined doctrines, of the Church of Rome, and anathematized, by the Council of Trent.
Leibniz was for the greater part of his active life the learned and confidential servant of the House of Brunswick; when the Duke had nothing better to do with him, he set him to research into ducal history. If Leibniz had a profession in literature, it was history rather than philosophy.
We will here give an account of the matter which, we trust, will go most directly to the heart of it, but we will make no claims to sufficient interpretation of Leibniz's thought-processes. Leibniz, then, like all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, was reforming scholasticism in the light of a new physical science.
The Cartesians say that God executes them; M. Leibniz will have it, that the soul itself does it; which appears to me impossible, because the soul has not the necessary instruments for such an execution. Now however infinite the power and knowledge of God be, he cannot perform with a machine deprived of a certain piece, what requires the concourse of such a piece.
Above all, he had himself a liberal and generous mind. It gave him pleasure to appreciate good wherever he could see it, and to discover a soul of truth in every opinion. From the moment when Leibniz became aware of himself as an independent thinker, he was the man of a doctrine.
The true plan was not to throw experience aside because it was alleged by the ignorant and the prejudiced, but to interrogate experience systematically, and so to become the Bacon or the Newton of legislation, instead of wandering off into the a priori constructions of a Descartes or a Leibniz.
'There is an X', he wanted to say, 'which scholasticism has defined as substantial form, but I am going to give a new definition of it. Entelechy was a useful name for X, the more so as it had the authority of Aristotle, the master of scholasticism. Under the name of entelechy Leibniz was upholding the soul of scholastic doctrine, while retrenching the limbs and outward flourishes.
Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between "it may be maintained that " and "it suffices that ." Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making it slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces to the strict minimum the hypothesis which is necessary in order to suppose the physics of Galileo indefinitely extensible.
Confucius was found particularly attractive, and was regarded as a forerunner of the Enlightenment. The "Monadism" of the philosopher Leibniz was influenced by these reports. The missionaries gained a reputation at court as "scientists", and in this they were of service both to China and to Europe.
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