A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

Leibnitz thus shows the fundamental principles upon which knowledge is based, but what does he say about the logical method of their combination? Nothing. No one would ever suspect from Leibnitz’s philosophical remains that he had planned a system of philosophy according to the method of Spinoza. The many pamphlets of Leibnitz on many scattered subjects show how far short he fell of his ideal of a universal philosophical calculus. He was too versatile, his interests were too diversified, to carry through so slow and plodding a task. He merely stated the principles upon which a systematic symbolic philosophy might rest, without developing these principles in a logical way. Like Bacon, Leibnitz conceived a method that was more of a hope than an accomplishment.

The Immediate Problem for Leibnitz. Perhaps Leibnitz was called away from this purely theoretical problem of method by the practical problem of reconciling science and religion, which problem in his day had become particularly acute. For science had made rapid strides since the days of Descartes, had drawn very far away from religion, and Leibnitz’s attempt to reconcile science and religion was much more difficult than that of the preceding Rationalists. Leibnitz hadaccepted the most radical results of science, but he saw that science had yielded only a mechanical view of the world. Politics demanded in the exigencies of that hour some principle of unity. He sought to find some philosophical principle for the living, religious character of the universe, and a principle that at the same time would preserve the results of science. He therefore sought to leave the conception of mechanical nature intact and go behind it for a teleological principle. He examined the mechanical principles of the science of his day and found them embedded in a deeper metaphysical principle.

The Result of Leibnitz’s Examination of the Principles of Science[35]—A Plurality of Metaphysical Substances. What was the developed scientific principle of Leibnitz’s time? And what was the result of his analysis of it? The principle was the mathematical principle of Galileo in more complex form, for there had been added to it since Galileo’s day the concept of the atom. That is to say, the fundamental scientific principle was that nature consists of the measurable movements of atoms. From his analysis of this, Leibnitz obtained as follows his conception of a plural number of substances, which he called monads.

1. Leibnitz first scrutinized the scientific conception of motion. His analysis of motion into infinitely small impulses by the method employed by Galileo, Huyghens, and Newton had already led him to one important discovery—the differential calculus. Now he scrutinizes it further and discovers that the fundamental ground of motion is force. While Leibnitz wasin entire agreement with other scientists in their effort to reduce all phenomena to motion, he insisted that motion was not by any means the fundamental thing. He calls the Cartesian conception of motion the antechamber of true philosophy. There is no absolute motion nor absolute rest. Motion and rest are relative to each other. Descartes’ theory that there is conservation of motion is incorrect. Motion and rest are the phenomenal changes of force. Force alone is constant and conserved. Physics points beneath itself to metaphysics; motion points to force. Force is what is fundamental in nature. Force is “that which in the present state of things brings about a change in the future.” Therefore force as the substance of nature is super-spatial and immaterial, and therefore the basis of the new physics ought to be dynamic metaphysical substance.

2. Leibnitz next examined the scientific conception of the atom. Gassendi, one of that celebrated group of Parisian scientists, had been the author of the introduction of Greek atomism into modern thought. It had been generally accepted by scientists and combined with the mathematical hypothesis of Galileo. Leibnitz had known Gassendi in Paris, and he took the hard, inelastic atoms of Gassendi under examination. He agreed that the atomist was perfectly correct in saying that material bodies consist of simple parts or atoms. But Leibnitz insisted that the atomist erred in thinking such simple parts to be physical. However simple the parts might physically appear to be, they were not really simple. However small a bit of matter may be, it may be divided again, and the dividing process may go on to infinity. The atom is the extended, and the extended cannot be simpleor real. Substance must be unextended, and the materialists were wrong in attributing substance to the extended. Is there anything simple that has a qualitative character? Is there anything real below the physical atoms? Yes, the metaphysical atoms. The indivisible, immaterial unit lies beneath the physical atom, and in order to reach it we must pass beneath the physical into the metaphysical. This immaterial or metaphysical atom is called by Leibnitz the monad; and thus is Leibnitz’s theory called monadology.

There are three kinds of points, or units, or “simples.” There is the mathematical point, which is simple enough, but it is only imaginary. There is the physical point, or atom, which is real but not simple. There is, lastly, the metaphysical point, or monad, which is both real and simple. The metaphysical point is the only true point. To call the material atoms real, only shows “the feebleness of the imagination, which is glad to rest, and is, therefore, in haste to make an end of division and analysis.”

3. Leibnitz then identified force, as the substance of motion, with the metaphysical atom, as the substance of the material atom. The result was the monad, as he conceived it. The monads are the principles of active working. They are the super-spatial and immaterial principles in which the mechanical principles of the universe have their roots and meaning. Nature is not dead; it is not merely extended. It is alive, resistant, and reproductive. If, as Spinoza taught, there were only one substance, nature would be non-resistant and passive. But as a matter of fact there are many substances acting for themselves, many bodies resisting other bodies. They are the centres of separate activity, andthere are as many forces as there are things. There is no body without movement, no movement without force. Thus does Leibnitz reintroduce vitalism in a maturer form than is seen in neo-Platonism. Life becomes the principle of nature. Purpose is placed at the centre of things.

The Double Nature of the Monads. The student will find that the philosophy of Leibnitz is spoken of as a pluralism, but the student will also find that Leibnitz devoted nearly all his strength to prove that the world is after all a unity. Leibnitz analyzed the world into a plural number of parts, and the question then with him was, how to put these parts together again in an organic unity. This accomplishment would depend a good deal upon his conception of the nature of the parts.

The monads have a double character. Leibnitz conceived the monad (1) as a force centre and (2) as an immaterial soul. This makes an equivalence of psychical and physical attributes which reminds us of the Stoics’ “fiery reason” of God. The word “force,” as Leibnitz uses it, squints both toward physics and toward psychology. But such ambiguity about the monads, the cornerstones in Leibnitz’s philosophy, assists Leibnitz’s reconciliation at the start. Here, in a miniature, the physical and spiritual lie in unity. The monad is conceived as a soul-atom.

Leibnitz came to philosophy with a mind saturated with the mathematical ideas of the continuous, the infinitesimal, and the possible. He thought of the monads as potentialities or possibilities. He looked upon the world as essentially a developing world. Behind the facts that seem to us inflexible, lies the great world of generating force. Explanation of the actual can be made only inview of what the actual may be and has been. Let us enlarge the scope of man by so widening his conception of the actual that it will include the possible. Leibnitz also spoke of the monads as infinitesimal. He thereby lifted the conception of the infinitesimal from the realm of mathematics into that of metaphysics, just as Hobbes universalized the conception of mechanics by lifting it to metaphysics. Leibnitz, therefore, did not regard the limits of perception as the limits of nature: the reality of a nature object must be too small to be the object of perception. In the same way he made use of his mathematical conception of continuity. Leibnitz’s conception of nature-continuity is one of his contributions to philosophy. Within itself the world of nature consists of a continuous gradation from the lower to the higher forms; and also the world of nature is continuous with the world of the spirit. There are no leaps in the series from matter to God. Seeming differences in kind are only differences in degree; for example, evil is only the absence of good; matter is only an obscure idea of spirit.