He asks, Does Christendom teach anything other than pure humanity? It must be founded upon humanity which is also Leibniz’ Codex des Völkerrechts.
It is clear, continues the commentator, that what a nation demands or wishes from another it must also offer; force, faithlessness, and bold arrogance of one toward the other enrage all nations. This Codex des Völkerrechts is written in the breasts of all human beings. Wherever his view was unobstructed, he saw clearly the political relationships of Europe, and prophesied much that followed.
The natural rights of mankind to be applied to humanity through states and nations, then, is what Herder notes at this point in Leibniz.
3. History, antiquities, languages.—Herder notes here that Leibniz liked above everything else in History the origins of races, Uranfänge der Völker, which led to their antiquities and language stocks. This accounts for his diligence in comparison and derivation of languages and in etymologies. Herder reminds us that a family tree of languages has been established since Leibniz’ time through the Russian journeys in Northern Asia, continuous news from China, the investigations of the English in India, and other studies made in Tibet, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, Africa, America, and the Southern world.
XXXII, 226: Herder’s discussion of Leibniz’ monad:
A monad is said to be able to change its representations (Vorstellungen) and it must change them in accordance with its fundamental force; now if these representations are nothing but external rapports, must there not lie in the fundamental force also the foundation of perceptibility of the external and the foundation of the constantly changing perceptibility?... If therefore, the soul is a living mirror of the universe then it must not reflect this universe from within itself outward.... But there must be an internal cause in every soul which accounts for the part of the universe which the soul looks upon and which cannot be sought in a third being, the cause of both.
Everywhere there is life; everywhere life is connected with organs, and where would the cause of the connection lie? Not in the life; not in the organ. Where then? A Deus ex machina must be called which contains the cause of the connection of both so that neither of these (life, organ) contain anything of this cause, and that is contradiction. One monad is said to rule over the others and over many others without there being in any one the cause of change which is in the other. A monad is said to heighten its forces just so much as its body heightens its own organization.
Now still this interconnected increase is to contain nothing in the one for the other; not causa efficiens, not conditio sine qua non, only simultaneousness. How unbelieveable! If the adjustment of the organs extends to the making of a certain relief or difference, then such a relief or difference in the perceptions and all the connecting comes about without internal cause, only one cause to explain so many effects which are scarcely covered by it. It seems to me the world would be incomparably simpler and more manifold if in every monad were the cause for its connection and all of its changes.
It seems evident that Herder accepts much of Leibniz’ theory of the monad. The important point of departure is expressed in the two sentences: