Part 21

3. THE PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY.—The universe is thus the sum of all the monads. Every thing, every composite, is an aggregate of monads. Thus every bodily organism is not one substance, but many, it is a multiplicity of monads, like a machine which is made up of a number of distinct pieces of mechanism. Leibnitz compared bodies to a fish-pond, which might be full of living elements, though dead itself. The ordinary view of things is thus wholly set aside; the truly substantial does not belong to bodies, _i. e._ to the aggregates, but to their original elements. Matter, in the vulgar sense, as something conceived to be without mind, does not at all exist. How now must the inner connection of the universe be conceived? In the following way. Every monad is a representative being, and at the same time, each one is different from every other. This difference, therefore, depends alone upon the difference of representation: there are just as many different degrees of representation as there are monads, and these degrees may be fixed according to some of their prominent stages. The representations may be classified according to the distinction between confused and distinct knowledge. Hence a monad of the lowest rank (a monad _toute nue_) will be one which _simply_ represents, _i. e._ which stands on the stage of most confused knowledge. Leibnitz compares this state with a swoon, or with our condition in a dreamy sleep, in which we are not without representations, (notions)—for otherwise we could have none when awaking—but in which the representations are so numerous that they neutralize each other and do not come into the consciousness. This is the stage of inorganic nature. In a higher rank are those monads in which the representation is active as a formative vital force, though still without consciousness. This is the stage of the vegetable world. Still higher ascends the life of the monad when it attains to sensation and memory, as is the case in the animal kingdom. The lower monads may be said to sleep, and the brute monads to dream. When still farther the soul rises to reason or reflection, we call it mind, spirit.—The distinction of the monads from each other is, therefore, this, that each one, though mirroring the whole and the same universe in itself, does it from a different point of view, and, therefore, differently, the one more, and the rest less perfectly. Each one is a different centre of the world which it mirrors. Each one contains the whole universe, the whole infinity within itself, and in this respect is like God, the only difference being that God knows every thing with perfect distinctness, while the monad represents it confusedly, though one monad may represent it more confusedly than another. The limitation of a monad does not, therefore, consist in its containing less than another or than God, but only in its containing more imperfectly or in its representing less distinctly.—Upon this standpoint the universe, in so far as every monad mirrors one and the same universe, though each in a different way, represents a drama of the greatest possible difference, as well as of the greatest possible unity and order, _i. e._ of the greatest possible perfection, or the _absolute harmony_. For distinction in unity is harmony.—But in still another respect the universe is a system of harmony. Since the monads do not work upon each other, but each one follows only the law of its own being, there is danger lest the inner harmony of the universe may be disturbed. How is this danger removed? Thus, viz., every monad mirrors the whole and the same universe. The changes of the collected monads, therefore, run parallel with each other, and in this consists the harmony of all as pre-established by God.

4. THE RELATION OF THE DEITY TO THE MONADS.—What part does the conception of God play in the system of Leibnitz? An almost idle one. Following the strict consequences of his system, Leibnitz should have held to no proper theism, but the harmony of the universe should have taken the place of the Deity. Ordinarily he considers God as the sufficient cause of all monads. But he was also accustomed to consider the final cause of a thing as its sufficient cause. In this respect, therefore, he almost identifies God and the absolute final cause. Elsewhere he considers the Deity as a simple primitive substance, or as the individual primitive unity. Again, he speaks of God as a pure immaterial actuality, _actus purus_, while to the monads belongs matter, _i. e._ restrained actuality, striving, _appetitio_. Once he calls him a monad, though this is in manifest contradiction with the determinations otherwise assigned him. It was for Leibnitz a very difficult problem to bring his monadology and his theism into harmony with each other, without giving up the premises of both. If he held fast to the substantiality of the monads, he was in danger of making them independent of the Deity, and if he did not, he could hardly escape falling back into Spinozism.

5. THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY is clearly explained on the standpoint of the pre-established harmony. This relation, taking the premises of the monadology, might seem enigmatical. If no monad can work upon any other, how can the soul work upon the body to lead and move it? The enigma is solved by the pre-established harmony. While the body and soul, each one independently of the other, follows the laws of its being, the body working mechanically, and the soul pursuing ends, yet God has established such a concordant harmony of the two activities, such a parallelism of the two functions, that there is in fact a perfect unity for body and soul. There are, says Leibnitz, three views respecting the relation of body and soul. The first and most common supposes a reciprocal influence between the two, but such a view is untenable, because there can be no interchange between mind and matter. The second and occasional one (_cf._ § XXV. 1), brings about this interchange through the constant assistance of God, which is nothing more nor less than to make God a _Deus ex machina_. Hence the only solution for the problem is the hypothesis of a pre-established harmony. Leibnitz illustrates these three views in the following example. Let one conceive of two watches, whose hands ever accurately point to the same time. This agreement may be explained, first (the common view), by supposing an actual connection between the hands of each, so that the hand of the one watch might draw the hand of the other after it, or second (the occasional view), by conceiving of a watch-maker who continually keeps the hands alike, or in fine (the pre-established harmony), by ascribing to each a mechanism so exquisitely wrought that each one goes in perfect independence of the other, and at the same time in entire agreement with it.—That the soul is immortal (indestructible), follows at once from the doctrine of monads. There is no proper death. That which is called death is only the soul losing a part of the monads which compose the mechanism of its body, while the living element goes back to a condition similar to that in which it was before it came upon the theatre of the world.

6. The monadology has very important consequences in reference to THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. As the philosophy of Leibnitz, by its opposition to Spinozism, had to do with the doctrine of being, so by its opposition to the empiricism of Locke must it expound the theory of knowledge. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding had attracted Leibnitz without satisfying him, and he therefore attempted a new investigation in his _Nouveaux Essais_, in which he defended the doctrine of innate ideas. But this hypothesis of innate ideas Leibnitz now freed from that defective view which had justified the objections of Locke. The innateness of the ideas must not be held as though they were explicitly and consciously contained in the mind, but rather the mind possesses them potentially and only virtually, though with the capacity to produce them out of itself. All thoughts are properly innate, _i. e._ they do not come into the mind from without, but are rather produced by it from itself. Any external influence upon the mind is inconceivable, it even needs nothing external for its sensations. While Locke had compared the mind to an unwritten piece of paper, Leibnitz likened it to a block of marble, in which the veins prefigure the form of the statue. Hence the common antithesis between rational and empirical knowledge disappears with Leibnitz in the degrees of greater or less distinctness.—Among these theoretically innate ideas, Leibnitz recognizes two of special prominence, which take the first rank as principles of all knowledge and all ratiocination,—the principle of contradiction (_principium contradictionis_), and the principle of sufficient cause (_principium rationis sufficientis_). To these, as a principle of the second rank, must be added the _principium indiscernibilium_, or the principle that there are in nature no two things wholly alike.

7. The most elaborate exhibition of Leibnitz’s theological views is given in his _Théodicée_. The Théodicée, is, however, his weakest work, and has but a loose connection with the rest of his philosophy. Written at the instigation of a woman, it belies this origin neither in its form nor in its content—not in its form, for in its effort to be popular it becomes diffuse and unscientific, and not in its content, for it accommodates itself to the positive dogmas and the premises of theology farther than the scientific basis of the system of Leibnitz would permit. In this work, Leibnitz investigates the relation of God to the world in order to show a conformity in this relation to a final cause, and to free God from the charge of acting without or contrary to an aim. Why is the world as it is? God might have created it very differently. True, answers Leibnitz, God saw an infinite number of worlds as possible before him, but out of all these he chose the one which actually is as the best. This is the famous doctrine of the best world, according to which no more perfect world is possible than the one which is.—But how so? Is not the existence of evil at variance with this? Leibnitz answers this objection by distinguishing three kinds of evil, the metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. The metaphysical evil, _i. e._ the finiteness and incompleteness of things, is necessary because inseparable from finite existence, and is thus independent of the will of God. Physical evil (pain, &c.), though not independent of the will of God, is often a good conditionally, _i. e._ as a punishment or means of improvement. Moral evil or wickedness can in no way be charged to the will of God. Leibnitz took various ways to account for its existence, and obviate the contradiction lying between it and the conception of God. At one time he says that wickedness is only permitted by God as a _conditio sine qua non_, because without wickedness there were no freedom, and without freedom no virtue. Again, he reduces the moral evil to the metaphysical, and makes wickedness nothing but a want of perfection, a negation, a limitation, playing the same part as do the shadows in a painted picture, or the discords in a piece of music, which do not diminish the beauty, but only increase it through contrast. Again, he distinguishes between the material and the formal element in a wicked act. The material of sin, the power to act, is from God, but the formal element, the wickedness of the act, belongs wholly to man, and is the result of his limitation, or, as Leibnitz here and there expresses it, of his eternal self-predestination. In no case can the harmony of the universe be destroyed through such a cause.

These are the chief points of Leibnitz’s philosophy. The general characteristic of it as given in the beginning of the present section, will be found to have its sanction in the specific exhibition that has now been furnished.

SECTION XXXIV.

BERKELEY.

Leibnitz had not carried out the standpoint of idealism to its extreme. He had indeed, on the one side, explained space and motion and bodily things as phenomena which had their existence only in a confused representation, but on the other side, he had not wholly denied the existence of the bodily world, but had recognized as a reality lying at its basis, the world of monads. The phenomenal or bodily world had its fixed and substantial foundation in the monads. Thus Leibnitz, though an idealist, did not wholly break with realism. The ultimate consequence of a subjective idealism would have been to wholly deny the reality of the objective, sensible world, and explain corporeal objects as simply phenomena, as nothing but subjective notions without any objective reality as a basis. This consequence the idealistic counterpart to the ultimate realistic result of materialism—appears in _George Berkeley_, who was born in Ireland, 1684, made bishop of the Anglican Church in 1734, and died in 1753. Hence, though he followed the empiricism of Locke, and sustained no outward connection with Leibnitz, we must place him in immediate succession to the latter as the perfecter of a subjective idealism.

Our sensations, says Berkeley, are entirely subjective. We are wholly in error if we believe that we have a sensation of external objects or perceive them. That which we have and perceive is only our sensations. It is _e. g._ clear, that by the sense of sight we can _see_ neither the distance, the size, nor the form of objects, but that we only _conclude_ that these exist, because our experience has taught us that a certain sensation of sight is always attended by certain sensations of touch. That which we see is only colors, clearness, obscurity, &c., and it is therefore false to say that we see and feel the same thing. So also we never go out of ourselves for those sensations to which we ascribe most decidedly an objective character. The peculiar objects of our understanding are only our own affections; all ideas are hence only our own sensations. But just as there can be no sensations outside of the sensitive subject, so no idea can have existence outside of him who possesses it. The so-called objects exist only in our notion, and have a being only as they are perceived. It is the great error of most philosophers that they ascribe to corporeal objects a being outside the conceiving mind, and do not see that they are only mental. It is not possible that material things should produce any thing so wholly distinct from themselves as sensations and notions. There is no such thing as a material external world; _mind alone exists_ as thinking being, whose nature consists in thinking and willing. But whence then arise all our sensations which come to us like the images of fancy, without our agency, and which are thus no products of our will? They arise from a spirit superior to ourselves—for only a spirit can produce within us notions—even from God. God gives us ideas; but as it would be contradictory to assert that a being could give what it does not possess, so ideas exist _in God_, and we derive them from him. These ideas in God may be called archetypes, and those in us ectypes.—In consequence of this view, says Berkeley, we do not deny an independent reality of things, we only deny that they can exist elsewhere than in an understanding. Instead therefore of speaking of a nature in which, _e. g._ the sun is the cause of warmth, &c., the accurate expression would be this: God announces to us through the sense of sight that we should soon perceive a sensation of warmth. Hence by nature we are only to understand the succession or the connection of ideas, and by natural laws the constant order in which they proceed, _i. e._ the laws of the association of ideas. This thorough-going subjective idealism, this complete denial of matter, Berkeley considered as the surest way to oppose materialism and atheism.

SECTION XXXV.

WOLFF.

The idealism of Berkeley, as was to be expected from the nature of the case, remained without any farther development, but the philosophy of Leibnitz was taken up and subjected to a farther revision by _Christian Wolff_. He was born in Breslau in 1679. He was chosen professor at Halle, where he became obnoxious to the charge of teaching a doctrine at variance with the Scriptures, and drew upon himself such a violent opposition from the theologians of the university, that a cabinet order was issued for his dismissal on the 8th of November, 1723, and he was enjoined to leave Prussia within forty-eight hours on pain of being hung. He then became professor in Marburg, but was afterwards recalled to Prussia by Frederic II. immediately upon his accession to the throne. He was subsequently made baron, and died 1754. In his chief thoughts he followed Leibnitz, a connection which he himself admitted, though he protested against the identification of his philosophy with that of Leibnitz, and objected to the name, _Philosophia Leibnitio-Wolffiana_, which was taken by his disciple Bilfinger. The historical merit of Wolff is threefold. First, and most important, he laid claim again to the whole domain of knowledge in the name of philosophy, and sought again to build up a systematic framework, and make an encyclopedia of philosophy in the highest sense of the word. Though he did not himself furnish much new material for this purpose, yet he carefully elaborated and arranged that which he found at hand. Secondly, he made again the philosophical method as such, an object of attention. His own method is, indeed, an external one as to its content, namely, the mathematical or the mathematico-syllogistical, recommended by Leibnitz, and by the application of this his whole philosophizing sinks to a level formalism. (For instance, in his principles of architecture, the eighth proposition is—“a window must be wide enough for two persons to recline together conveniently,”—a proposition which is thus proved: “we are more frequently accustomed to recline and look out at a window in company with another person than alone, and hence, since the builder of the house should satisfy the owner in every respect (§ 1), he must make a window wide enough for two persons conveniently to recline within it at the same time”.) Still this formalism is not without its advantage, for it subjects the philosophical content to a logical treatment. Thirdly, Wolff has taught philosophy to speak German, an art which it has not since forgotten. Next to Leibnitz, he is entitled to the merit of having made the German language for ever the organ of philosophy.

The following remarks will suffice for the content and the scientific classification of Wolff’s philosophy. He defines philosophy to be the science of the possible as such. But that is possible which contains no contradiction. Wolff defends this definition against the charge of presuming too much. It is not affirmed, he says, with this definition that either he or any other philosopher knows every thing which is possible. The definition only claims for philosophy the whole province of human knowledge, and it is certainly proper that philosophy should be described according to the highest perfection which it can attain, even though it has not yet actually reached it.—In what parts now does this science of the possible consist? Resting on the perception that there are within the soul two faculties, one of knowing and one of willing, Wolff divides philosophy into two great parts, theoretical philosophy (an expression, however, which first appears among his followers), or metaphysics, and practical philosophy. Logic precedes both as a preliminary training for philosophical study. Metaphysics are still farther divided by Wolff into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and natural theology; practical philosophy he divides into ethics, whose object is man as man; economics, whose object is man as a member of the family; and politics, whose object is man as a citizen of the state.

1. ONTOLOGY is the first part of Wolff’s metaphysics. Ontology treats of what are now called categories, or those fundamental conceptions which are applied to every object, and must therefore at the outset be investigated. Aristotle had already furnished a table of categories, but he had derived them wholly empirically. It is not much better with the ontology of Wolff; it is laid out like a philosophical dictionary. At its head he places the principle of contradiction, viz.: it is not possible for any thing to be, and at the same time not to be. The conception of the possible at once follows from this principle. That is possible which contains no contradiction. That is necessary, the opposite of which contradicts itself, and that is accidental, the opposite of which is possible. Every thing which is possible is a thing, though only an imaginary one; that which neither is, nor is possible, is nothing. When many things together compose a thing, this is a whole, and the individual things comprehended by it are its parts. The greatness of a thing consists in the multitude of its parts. If A contains that by which we can understand the being of B, then that in A by which B becomes understood is the ground of B, and the whole A which contains the ground of B is its cause. That which contains the ground of its properties is the essence of a thing. Space is the arrangement of things which exist conjointly. Place is the determinate way in which a thing exists in conjunction with others. Movement is change of place. Time is the arrangement of that which exists successively, etc.

2. COSMOLOGY.—Wolff defines the world to be a series of changing objects, which exist conjointly and successively, but which are so connected together that one ever contains the ground of the other. Things are connected in space and in time. By virtue of this universal connection, the world is one united whole; the essence of the world consists in the manner of its connection. But this manner cannot be changed. It can neither receive any new ingredients nor lose any of those it possesses. From the essence of the world spring all its changes. In this respect the world is a machine. Events in the world are only hypothetically necessary in so far as previous events have had a certain character; they are accidental in so far as the world might have been directed otherwise. In respect to the question whether the world had a beginning in time, Wolff does not express himself explicitly. Since God is independent of time, but the world has been from eternity in time, the world therefore is in no case eternal in any sense like God. But according to Wolff, neither space nor time has any substantial being. Body is a connected thing composed of matter, and possessing a moving power within itself. The powers of a body taken together are called its nature, and the comprehension of all being is called nature in general. That which has its ground in the essence of the world is called natural, and that which has not, is supernatural, or a wonder. At the close of his cosmology, Wolff treats of the perfection and imperfection of the world. The perfection of a world consists in the harmony with each other of every thing which exists conjointly and successively. But since every thing has its separate rules, the individual must give up so much from its perfection as is necessary for the symmetry of the whole.