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Updated: May 8, 2025
There is good reason to believe, following the parallelism of the two realms, that of final causes and that of efficient causes, that God has established in the universe a connexion between punishment or reward and bad or good action, in accordance wherewith the first should always be attracted by the second, and virtue and vice obtain their reward and their punishment in consequence of the natural sequence of things, which contains still another kind of pre-established harmony than that which appears in the communication between the soul and the body.
It is, as I have already said, the fetichism of mechanics: parallelism takes its inspiration from this quite as directly as does materialism, but with more skill, inasmuch as it avoids the most dangerous question, that of the interaction of physics and morals, and replaces it by an hypothesis much resembling Leibnitz's hypothesis of the pre-established harmony, On the other hand, a second merit of this prudent doctrine is the avoiding the question of genesis.
A smile was again the answer of her companion, and the carriage still drove on to the well-known residence of the young Baron of Ballochgray a man who, knowing the weakness of his King, James the Third of Scotland, in his love of astrology and divination, and their sister black arts, had, with much address, endeavoured to recommend himself to his sovereign, by a character pre-established in his own castle, for a successful cultivation of the occult sciences.
That is why I have always liked ingenious objections made against my own opinions, and I have never examined them without profit: witness those which M. Bayle formerly made against my System of Pre-established Harmony, not to mention those which M. Arnauld, M. l'Abbé Foucher and Father Lami, O.S.B., made to me on the same subject.
The System of Pre-established Harmony is the one best qualified to cure this evil. For it shows that there are of necessity substances which are simple and without extension, scattered throughout all Nature; that these substances must subsist independently of every other except God; and that they are never wholly separated from organic body.
For albeit I do not hold that the soul changes the laws of the body, or that the body changes the laws of the soul, and I have introduced the Pre-established Harmony to avoid this derangement, I nevertheless admit a true union between the soul and the body, which makes thereof a suppositum. This union belongs to the metaphysical, whereas a union of influence would belong to the physical.
It has been the object of the preceding paragraphs to show that Leibniz the politician and Leibniz the theologian were one and the same person; not at all to suggest that his rational theology was just political expediency. We may apply to him a parody of his own doctrine, the pre-established harmony between nature and grace.
Hence, the successors of Descartes either found themselves obliged, with the Occasionalists, to call in the aid of the Deity, who was supposed to be a sort of go-between betwixt matter and spirit; or they had recourse, with Leibnitz, to the doctrine of pre-established harmony, which denied any influence of the body on the soul, or vice versâ, and compared matter and spirit to two clocks so accurately regulated to keep time with one another, that the one struck when ever the other pointed to the hour; or, with Berkeley, they abolished the "substance" of matter altogether, as a superfluity, though they failed to see that the same arguments equally justified the abolition of soul as another superfluity, and the reduction of the universe to a series of events or phenomena; or, finally, with Spinoza, to whom Berkeley makes a perilously close approach, they asserted the existence of only one substance, with two chief attributes, the one, thought, and the other, extension.
But if so, why does Leibniz keep saying that the harmony is pre-established, by special and infinitely elaborate divine decrees? Leibniz himself says that the very nature of representation excludes interaction. By representing environment a mind does not do anything to environment, that is plain. But it is no less plain that environment does nothing to it, either.
This could only proceed from the Author of things, infinitely powerful and infinitely wise, who, creating all in the beginning in due order, had pre-established there all order and artifice that was to be. There is no chaos in the inward nature of things, and there is organism everywhere in a matter whose disposition proceeds from God.
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