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Updated: June 10, 2025
They were supposed by him to be percipient, self-acting beings, not under arbitrary control of the deity, and yet God himself was the original monad from which all the rest are generated. With this conception as a basis, Leibnitz deduced his doctrine of pre-established harmony, whereby the numerous independent substances composing the world are made to form one universe.
These, however adorned, and hid under whatever embellishments of rhetoric and sentiment, are at bottom identical with the arguments we are at present to discuss. This proof, termed by Leibnitz the argumentum a contingentia mundi, I shall now lay before the reader, and subject to a strict examination.
As Leibnitz, though not murdered, may be said to have died, partly of the fear that he should be murdered, and partly of vexation that he was not, Kant, on the other hand who had no ambition in that way had a narrower escape from a murderer than any man we read of, except Des Cartes. So absurdly does fortune throw about her favors!
Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pré-établie' of Leibnitz; it is borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man, says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their union?
C. A discussion of the various-theories of the earth put forward by Scheuchzer, Moro, Bonnet, Woodward, White, Leibnitz, Linnæus, and Buffon. The third part contains an "Attempt to give a sound explanation of the ancient history of the earth."
And thus Leibnitz regarded space as a certain order in the community of substances, and time as the dynamical sequence of their states.
It is when such errors receive the sanction of Christian philosophers, like Hartley and Leibnitz, and are recommended to the human mind by a pious zeal for the glory of God, that they are apt to obtain a frightful currency and become far more desolating in their effects. “The doctrine of necessity,” says Hartley, “has a tendency to abate all resentment against men: since all they do against us is by the appointment of God, it is rebellion against him to be offended with them.”
Indeed, it has been objected against the scheme of Leibnitz, “that it seems to make something which I do not know how to express otherwise than by the ancient stoical fate, antecedent and superior even to God himself.
While Ernst August, as well as the German emperor and Peter the Great, distinguished the philosopher, who was not indifferent to such honors, by the bestowal of titles and preferments, his relations with the Hanoverian court, which until then had been so cordial, grew cold after the Elector Georg Ludwig ascended the English throne as George I. The letters which Leibnitz interchanged with his daughter-in-law, gave rise to the correspondence, continued to his death, with Clarke, who defended the theology of Newton against him.
For our part, greatly as we admire sound reasoning and consistency in speculation, we had rather be guilty of ten thousand acts of logical inconsistency, such as those of Edwards, or Leibnitz, or Descartes, than to be capable of resting in the conclusion to which the logic of Spinoza conducted him—that every moral distinction is a vulgar prejudice, and that the existence of moral goodness is a dream.
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