[Footnote 21: Reflexions sur l'Essai de l'Entendement humain.]
Mr. Lewes, in his "Biographical History of Philosophy," speaks of the essay from which these words are quoted, as written in "a somewhat supercilious tone." We are unable to detect any such feature in it. That trait was wholly foreign from Leibnitz's nature. "Car je suis des plus dociles," he says of himself, in this same essay. He was the most tolerant of philosophers. "Je ne méprise presque rien."—"Nemo est ingenio minus quam ego censorio."— "Mirum dictu: probo pleraque quae lego."—"Non admodum refutationes quaerere aut legere soleo."
To return to the monads. Each monad, according to Leibnitz, is, properly speaking, a soul, inasmuch as each is endowed with perception. But in order to distinguish those which have only perception from those which have also sentiment and memory, he will call the latter souls, the former monads or entelechies. [22]
[Footnote 22: Entelechy ([Greek: entelechia]) is an Aristotelian term, signifying activity, or more properly perhaps, self action. Leibnitz understands by it something complete in itself ([Greek: echon to enteles]). Mr. Butler, in his History of Ancient Philosophy, lately reprinted in this country, translates it "act." Function, we think would be a better rendering. (See W. Archer Butler's Lectures, Last Series, Lect. 2.) Aristotle uses the word as a definition of the soul. "The soul," he says, "is the first entelechy of an active body.">[
The naked monad, he says, has perceptions without relief, or "enhanced flavor"; it is in a state of stupor. Death, he thinks, may produce this state for a time in animals. The monads completely fill the world; there is never and nowhere a void, and never complete inanimateness and inertness. The universe is a plenum of souls. Wherever we behold an organic whole, (unum per se,) there monads are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. There is no generation out of nothing, and no absolute death. Birth is expansion, development, growth; and death is contraction, envelopment, decrease. The monads which are destined to become human souls have existed from the beginning in organic matter, but only as sentient or animal souls, without reason. They remain in this condition until the generation of the human beings to which they belong, and then develope themselves into rational souls. The different organs and members of the body are also relatively souls which collect around them a number of monads for a specific purpose, and so on ad infinitum. Matter is not only infinitely divisible, but infinitely divided. All matter (so called) is living and active. "Every particle of matter may be conceived as a garden of plants, or as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of each plant, each member of each animal, each drop of their humors, is in turn another such garden or pond." [23]
[Footnote 23: Monadol. 67.]
The connection between monads, consequently the connection between soul and body, is not composition, but an organic relation,—in some sort, a spontaneous relation. The soul forms its own body, and moulds it to its purpose. This hypothesis was afterward embraced and developed as a physiological principle by Stahl. As all the atoms in one body are organically related, so all the beings in the universe are organically related to each other and to the All. One creature, or one organ of a creature, being given, there is given with it the world's history from the beginning to the end. All bodies are strictly fluid; the universe is in flux.
The principle of continuity answers the same purpose in Leibnitz's system that the single substance does in Spinoza's. It vindicates the essential unity of all being. Yet the two conceptions are immeasurably different, and constitute an immeasurable difference between the two systems, considered in their practical and moral bearings, as well as their ontological aspects. Spinoza [24] starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral result of his system, Godward, is fatalism,—manward, indifferentism and negation of moral good and evil. Leibnitz ends in theism; the moral result of his system, Godward, is optimism,—manward, liberty, personal responsibility, moral obligation.
[Footnote 24: See Helferich's Spinoza, und Leibnitz, p. 76.]
He demonstrates the being of God by the necessity of a sufficient reason to account for the series of things. Each finite thing requires an antecedent or contingent cause. But the supposition of an endless sequence of contingent causes, or finite things, is absurd; the series must have had a beginning, and that beginning cannot have been a contingent cause or finite thing. "The final reason of things must be found in a necessary substance in which the detail of changes exists eminently, (ne soit qu'éminemment,) as in its source; and this is what we call God." [25]