The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858

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[Transcriber's note: without this notation and its underlying logic,
the development of modern computers would have not been practical.]

Of this world-wide correspondence a portion related to the sore
subject of his litigated claim to originality in the discovery of
the Differential Calculus,--a matter in which Leibnitz felt himself
grievously wronged, and complained with justice of the treatment he
received at the hands of his contemporaries. The controversy between
him and Newton, respecting this hateful topic, would never have
originated with either of these illustrious men, had it depended on
them alone to vindicate their respective claims. Officious and
ill-advised friends of the English philosopher, partly from misguided
zeal and partly from levelled malice, preferred on his behalf a
charge of plagiarism against the German, which Newton was not likely
to have urged for himself. "The new Calculus, which Europe lauds, is
nothing less," they suggested, "than your fluxionary method, which
Mr. Leibnitz has pirated, anticipating its tardy publication by the
genuine author. Why suffer your laurels to be wrested from you by a
stranger?" Thereupon arose the notorious _Commercium Epistolicum_,
in which Wallis, Fatio de Duillier, Collins, and Keill were
perversely active. Melancholy monument of literary and national
jealousy! Weary record of a vain strife! Ideas are no man's property.
As well pretend to ownership of light, or set up a claim to private
estate in the Holy Ghost. The Spirit blows where it lists. Truth
inspires whom it finds. He who knows best to conspire with it has it.
Both philosophers swerved from their native simplicity and nobleness
of soul. Both sinned and were sinned against. Leibnitz did unhandsome
things, but he was sorely tried. His heart told him that the right
of the quarrel was on his side, and the general stupidity would not
see it. The general malice, rejoicing in aspersion of a noble name,
would not see it. The Royal Society would not see it,--nor France,
until long after Leibnitz's death. Sir David Brewster's account of
the matter, according to the German authorities, Gerhardt, Guhrauer,
and others, is one-sided, and sins by _suppressio veri_, ignoring
important documents, particularly Leibnitz's letter to Oldenburg,
August 27, 1676. Gerhardt has published Leibnitz's own history of
the Calculus as a counter-statement. [10] But even from Brewster's
account, as we remember it, (we have it not by us at this writing.)
there is no more reason to doubt that Leibnitz's discovery was
independent of Newton's than that Newton's was independent of
Leibnitz's. The two discoveries, in fact, are not identical; the end
and application are the same, but origin and process differ, and the
German method has long superseded the English. The question in debate
has been settled by supreme authority. Leibnitz has been tried by his
peers. Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Poisson, and Biot have honorably
acquitted him of plagiarism, and reinstated him in his rights as true
discoverer of the Differential Calculus.

[Footnote 10: Historia et Oriffo Calculi Differenttalis, a G. G.
LEIBNITIO conscripts.]

[Transcriber's note: this controversy rages in academia to this day.]

The one distinguishing trait of Leibnitz's genius, and the one
predominant fact in his history, was what Feuerbach calls his [Greek:
polupraguoshinae], which, being interpreted, means having a finger
in every pie. We are used to consider him as a man of letters; but
the greater part of his life was spent in labors of quite another
kind. He was more actor than writer. He wrote only for occasions, at
the instigation of others, or to meet some pressing demand of the
time. Besides occupying himself with mechanical inventions, some of
which (in particular, his improvement of Pascal's Calculating Machine)
were quite famous in their day,--besides his project of a universal
language, and his labors to bring about a union of the churches,--
besides undertaking the revision of the laws of the German Empire,
superintending the Hanoverian mines, experimenting in the culture of
silk, directing the medical profession, laboring in the promotion of
popular education, establishing academies of science, superintending
royal libraries, ransacking the archives of Germany and Italy to
find documents for his history of the House of Brunswick, a work of
immense research [11],--besides these, and a multitude of similar and
dissimilar avocations, he was deep in politics, German and European,
and was occupied all his life long with political negotiations. He was
a courtier, he was a _diplomat_, was consulted on all difficult
matters of international policy, was employed at Hanover, at Berlin, at
Vienna, in the public and secret service of ducal, royal, and imperial
governments, and charged with all sorts of delicate and difficult
commissions,--matters of finance, of pacification, of treaty and
appeal. He was Europe's factotum. A complete biography of the man
would be an epitome of the history of his time. The number and variety
of his public engagements were such as would have crazed any ordinary
brain. And to these were added private studies not less multifarious.
"I am distracted beyond all account," he writes to Vincent Placcius.
"I am making extracts from archives, inspecting ancient documents,
hunting up unpublished manuscripts; all this to illustrate the
history of Brunswick. Letters in great number I receive and write.
Then I have so many discoveries in mathematics, so many speculations
in philosophy, so many other literary observations, which I am
desirous of preserving, that I am often at a loss what to take hold
of first, and can fairly sympathize in that saying of Ovid, 'I am
straitened by my abundance.' [12]"

[Footnote 11: _Annals Imperii Occidents Brunsvicensis_. Leibnitz
succeeded in discovering at Modena the lost traces of that
connection between the lines of Brunswick and Esto which had been
surmised, but not proved.]

[Footnote 12: "Quam mirifice sim distractus dici non potest. Varia ex
archivis eruo, antiquas chartns inspicio, manuscripta inedita
conquiro. Ex hic lucem dare conor Brunsvicensi historiae. Magno
numero litteras et accipio et dimitto. Habeo vero tam multa nova in
mathematicis, tot cogitationes in philosophicis, tot alias
literarias observationes, quas vellem non perire, ut saepe inter
agenda anceps haeream et prope illud Ovidianum sentiam: _Iniopem me
copia facit_."]

His diplomatic services are less known at present than his literary
labors, but were not less esteemed in his own day. When Louis XIV.,
in 1688, declared war against the German Empire, on the pretence
that the Emperor was meditating an invasion of France, Leibnitz drew
up the imperial manifesto, which repelled the charge and triumphantly
exposed the hollowness of Louis's cause. Another document, prepared
by him at the solicitation, it is supposed, of several of the courts
of Europe, advocating the claims of Charles of Austria to the vacant
throne of Spain, in opposition to the grandson of Louis, and setting
forth the injurious consequences of the policy of the French monarch,
was hailed by his contemporaries as a masterpiece of historical
learning and political wisdom. By his powerful advocacy of the cause
of the Elector of Brandenburg he may be said to have aided the birth
of the kingdom of Prussia, whose existence dates with the
commencement of the last century. In the service of that kingdom he
wrote and published important state-papers; among them, one relating
to a point of contested right to which recent events have given
fresh significance: "Traite: Sommaire du Droit de Frederic I. Roi de
Prusse a la Souverainete de Neufchatel et de Vallengin en Suisse."

In Vienna, as at Berlin, the services of Leibnitz were subsidized by
the State. By the Peace of Utrecht, the house of Habsburg had been
defeated in its claims to the Spanish throne, and the foreign and
internal affairs of the Austrian government were involved in many
perplexities, which, it was hoped, the philosopher's counsel might
help to untangle. He was often present at the private meetings of
the cabinet, and received from the Emperor the honorable distinction
of Kaiserlicher Hofrath, in addition to that, which had previously
been awarded to him, of Baron of the Empire. The highest post in the
gift of government was open to him, on condition of renouncing his
Protestant faith, which, notwithstanding his tolerant feeling toward
the Roman Church, and the splendid compensations which awaited such
a convertite, he could never be prevailed upon to do.

A natural, but very remarkable consequence of this manifold activity
and lifelong absorption in public affairs was the failure of so
great a thinker to produce a single systematic and elaborate work
containing a complete and detailed exposition of his philosophical,
and especially his ontological views. For such an exposition
Leibnitz could find at no period of his life the requisite time and
scope. In the vast multitude of his productions there is no complete
philosophic work. The most arduous of his literary labors are
historical compilations, made in the service of the State. Such were
the "History of the House of Brunswick," already mentioned, the
"Accessiones Historiae," the "Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium
Illustrationi inservientes," and the "Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus";--
works involving an incredible amount of labor and research, but
adding little to his posthumous fame. His philosophical studies,
after entering the Hanoverian service, which he did in his thirtieth
year, were pursued, as he tells his correspondent Placcius, by
stealth,--that is, at odd moments snatched from official duties and
the cares of state. Accordingly, his metaphysical works have all a
fragmentary character. Instead of systematic treatises, they are
loose papers, contributions to journals and magazines, or sketches
prepared for the use of friends. They are all occasional productions,
elicited by some external cause, not prompted by inward necessity.
The "Nouveaux Essais," his most considerable work in that department,
originated in comments on Locke, and was not published until after
his death. The "Monadology" is a series of propositions drawn up for
the use of Prince Eugene, and was never intended to be made public.
And, probably, the "Theodicee" would never have seen the light
except for his cultivated and loved pupil, the Queen of Prussia, for
whose instruction it was designed.

It is a curious fact, and a good illustration of the state of
letters in Germany at that time, that Leibnitz wrote so little--
almost nothing of importance--in his native tongue. In Erdmann's
edition of his philosophical works there are only two short essays
in German; the rest are all Latin or French. He had it in
contemplation at one time to establish a philosophical journal in
Berlin, but doubts, in his letter to M. La Croye on the subject, in
what language it should be conducted: "Il y a quelque tems que j'ay
pense a un journal de Savans qu'on pourroit publier a Berlin, mais
je suis un peu en doute sur la langue ... Mais soit qu'on prit le
Latin ou le Francois," [13] etc. It seems never to have occurred to him
that such a journal might be published in German. That language was
then, and for a long time after, regarded by educated Germans very much
as the Russian is regarded at the present day, as the language of vulgar
life, unsuited to learned or polite intercourse. Frederic the Great,
a century later, thought as meanly of its adaptation to literary
purposes as did the contemporaries of Leibnitz. When Gellert, at his
request, repeated to him one of his fables, he expressed his
surprise that anything so clever could be produced in German. It may
be said in apology for this neglect of their native tongue, that the
German scholars of that age would have had a very inadequate audience,
had their communications been confined to that language. Leibnitz
craved and deserved a wider sphere for his thoughts than the use of
the German could give him. It ought, however, to be remembered to
his credit, that, as language in general was one among the
numberless topics he investigated, so the German in particular
engaged at one time his special attention. It was made the subject
of a disquisition, which suggested to the Berlin Academy, in the
next century, the method adopted by that body for the culture and
improvement of the national speech. In this writing, as in all his
German compositions, he manifested a complete command of the language,
and imparted to it a purity and elegance of diction very uncommon in
his day. The German of Leibnitz is less antiquated at this moment
than the English of his contemporary, Locke.

[Footnote 13: KORTHOLT. _Epistolae ad Diversos_, Vol. I.]

LEIBNITZ'S PHILOSOPHY.

The interest to us in this extraordinary man--who died at Hanover,
1716, in the midst of his labors and projects--turns mainly on his
speculative philosophy. It was only as an incidental pursuit that he
occupied himself with metaphysic; yet no philosopher since Aristotle--
with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he
has much in common--has furnished more luminous hints to the
elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were
those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine
metaphysician, most fascinating of all topics, the nature of
substance, matter and spirit, absolute being,--in a word,
_Ontology_. This department of metaphysic, the most interesting,
and, _agonistically_ [14], the most important branch of that study,
has been deliberately, purposely, and, with one or two exceptions,
uniformly avoided by the English metaphysicians so-called, with
Locke at their head, and equally by their Scottish successors, until
the recent "Institutes" of the witty Professor of St. Andrew's.
Locke's "Essay concerning the Human Understanding," a century and
a half ago, diverted the English mind from metaphysic proper into
what is commonly called Psychology, but ought, of right, to be termed
_Noology_, or "Philosophy of the Human Mind," as Dugald Stewart
entitled his treatise. This is the study which has usually taken the
place of metaphysic at Cambridge and other colleges,--the science that
professes to show "how ideas enter the mind"; which, considering the
rareness of the occurrence with the mass of mankind, we cannot
regard as a very practical inquiry. We well remember our
disappointment, when, at the usual stage in the college curriculum,
we were promised "metaphysics" and were set to grind in Stewart's
profitless mill, where so few problems of either practical or
theoretical importance are brought to the hopper, and where, in fact,
the object is rather to show how the upper mill-stone revolves upon
the nether, (reflection upon sensation,) and how the grist is
conveyed to the feeder, than to realize actual metaphysical flour.

[Footnote 14: That is, as a discipline of the faculties,--the chief
benefit to be derived from any kind of metaphysical study.]

Locke's reason for repudiating ontology is the alleged impossibility
of arriving at truth in that pursuit,--"of finding satisfaction in
a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concern us, whilst
we let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of being." [15]
Unfortunately, however, as Kant has shown, the results of nooelogical
inquiry are just as questionable as those of ontology, whilst the
topics on which it is employed are of far inferior moment. If, as
Locke intimates, we can know nothing of being without first
analyzing the understanding, it is equally sure that we can know
nothing of the understanding except in union with and in action on
being. And excepting his own fundamental position concerning the
sensuous origin of our ideas,--to which few, since Kant, will assent,--
there is hardly a theorem, in all the writings of this school, of
prime and vital significance. The school is tartly, but aptly,
characterized by Professor Ferrier: "Would people inquire directly
into the laws of thought and of knowledge by merely looking to
knowledge or to thought itself, without attending to what is known
or what is thought of? Psychology usually goes to work in this
abstract fashion; but such a mode of procedure is hopeless,--as
hopeless as the analogous instance by which the wits of old were
wont to typify any particularly fruitless undertaking,--namely, the
operation of milking a he-goat into a sieve. No milk comes, in the
first place, and even that the sieve will not retain! There is a loss
of nothing twice over. Like the man milking, the inquirer obtains no
milk in the first place; and, in the second place, he loses it,
like the man holding the sieve.... Our Scottish philosophy, in
particular, has presented a spectacle of this description. Reid
obtained no result, owing to the abstract nature of his inquiry, and
the nothingness of his system has escaped through all the sieves of
his successors." [16]

[Footnote 15: _Essay_, Book I. Chap. 1, Sect. 7.]

[Footnote 16: _Institutes of Metaphysic_, p. 301.]

Leibnitz's metaphysical speculations are scattered through a wide
variety of writings, many of which are letters to his contemporaries.
These Professor Erdmann has incorporated in his edition of the
Philosophical Works. Beside these we may mention, as particularly
deserving of notice, the "Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et
Ideis", the "Systeme Nouveau de la Nature", "De Primae Philosophiae
Emendatione et de Notione Substantiae", "Reflexions sur l'Essai de
l'Entendement humain", "De Rerum Originatione Radicali", "De ipsa
Natura", "Considerations sur la Doctrine d'un Esprit universel",
"Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement humain", "Considerations sur le
Principe de Vie". To these we must add the "Theodicee" (though more
theological than metaphysical) and the "Monadologie", the most
compact philosophical treatise of modern time. It is worthy of note,
that, writing in the desultory, fragmentary, and accidental way he
did, he not only wrote with unexampled clearness on matters the most
abstruse, but never, that we are aware, in all the variety of his
communications, extending over so many years, contradicted himself.
No philosopher is more intelligible, none more consequent.

In philosophy, Leibnitz was a _Realist_. We use that term in the
modern, not in the scholastic sense. In the scholastic sense, as we
have seen, he was not a Realist, but, from childhood up, a Nominalist.
But the Realism of the schools has less affinity with the Realism
than with the Idealism of the present day.

His opinions must be studied in connection with those of his
contemporaries.

Des Cartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibnitz, the four most
distinguished philosophers of the seventeenth century, represent
four widely different and cardinal tendencies in philosophy: Dualism,
Idealism, Sensualism, and Realism.

Des Cartes perceived the incompatibility of the two primary
qualities of being, thought and extension, as attributes of one and
the same (created) substance. He therefore postulated two (created)
substances,--one characterized by thought without extension, the
other by extension without thought. These two are so alien and so
incongruous, that neither can influence the other, or determine the
other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation
of Deity. (The doctrine of Occasional Causes.) This is Dualism,--
that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter, which Des
Cartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into
philosophic significance, and which ever since has been the
prevailing ontology of the Western world. So deeply has the thought
of that master mind inwrought itself into the very consciousness of
humanity!

Spinoza saw, that, if God alone can bring mind and matter together
and effect a relation between them, it follows that mind and matter,
or their attributes, however contrary, do meet in Deity; and if so,
what need of three distinct natures? What need of two substances
beside God, as subjects of these attributes? Retain the middle term
and drop the extremes and you have the Spinozan doctrine of one
(uncreated) substance, combining the attributes of thought and
extension. This is Pantheism, or _objective_ idealism, as
distinguished from the _subjective_ idealism of Fichte. Strange,
that the stigma of atheism should have been affixed to a system
whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is
the _ignoration_ of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and
devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and
Spinozism a surfeit of Deity. [17]

[Footnote 17: Let us not be misunderstood. Pantheism is not Theism, and
the one substance of Spinoza is very unlike the one God of theology;
but neither is the doctrine Atheism in any legitimate sense.]

Naturally enough, the charge of atheism comes from the unbelieving
Bayle, whose omnivorous mind, like the anaconda, assisted its
enormous deglutition with a poisonous saliva of its own, and whose
negative temper makes the "Dictionnaire Historique" more _Morgue_
than _Valhalla_.

Locke, who combined in a strange union strong religious faith with
philosophic unbelief, turned aside, as we have seen, from the
questions which had occupied his predecessors; knew little and cared
less about substance and accident, matter and spirit; but set
himself to investigate the nature of the organ itself by which truth
is apprehended. In this investigation he began by emptying the mind
of all native elements of knowledge. He repudiated any supposed
dowry of original truths or innate or connate ideas, and endeavored
to show how, by acting on the report of the senses and personal
experience, the understanding arrives at all the ideas of which
it is conscious. The mode of procedure in this case is empiricism;
the result with Locke was sensualism,--more fully developed by
Condillac, [18] in the next century. But the same method may lead, as
in the case of Berkeley, to immaterialism, falsely called idealism.
Or it may lead, as in the case of Helveticus, to materialism. Locke
himself would probably have landed in materialism, had he followed
freely the bent of his own thought, without the restraints of a
cautious temper, and respect for the common and traditional opinion
of his time. The "Essay" discovers an unmistakable leaning in that
direction; as where the author supposes, "We shall never be able to
know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible
for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation,
to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter
fitly disposed a power to perceive and think;... it being, in respect
of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive
that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty
of thinking, since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what
sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power,
which cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure
and bounty of the Creator. For I see no contradiction in it, that
the first thinking eternal Being should, if he pleased, give to
certain systems of created, senseless matter, put together as he
thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought." With
such notions of the nature of thought, as a kind of mechanical
contrivance, that can be conferred outright by an arbitrary act of
Deity, and attached to one nature as well as another, it is evident
that Locke could have had no idea of spirit as conceived by
metaphysicians,--or no belief in that idea, if conceived. And with
such conceptions of Deity and Divine operations, as consisting in
absolute power dissociated from absolute reason, one would not be
surprised to find him asserting, that God, if he pleased, might make
two and two to be one, instead of four,--that mathematical laws are
arbitrary determinations of the Supreme Will,--that a thing is true
only as God wills it to be so,--in fine, that there is no such thing
as absolute truth. The resort to "Omnipotency" in such matters is
more convenient than philosophical; it is a dodging of the question,
instead of an attempt to solve it. Divine ordination--"[Greek: Doz
d' etelevto Bonlae]"--is a maxim which settles all difficulties.
But it also precludes all inquiry. Why speculate at all, with this
universal solvent at hand?

[Footnote 18: _Essai sur l'Origine du Connaissances humaines_. Book
IV. Chap. 3, Sect. 6.]

The "contradiction" which Locke could not see was clearly seen and
keenly felt by Leibnitz. The arbitrary will of God, to him, was no
solution. He believed in necessary truths independent of the Supreme
Will; in other words, he believed that the Supreme Will is but the
organ of the Supreme Reason: "Il ne faut point s'imaginer, que les
verites eternelles, etant dependantes de Dieu, sont arbitrages et
dependent de sa volonte." He felt, with Des Cartes, the incompatibility
of thought with extension, considered as an immanent quality of
substance, and he shared with Spinoza the unific propensity which
distinguishes the higher order of philosophic minds. Dualism was an
offence to him. On the other hand, he differed from Spinoza in his
vivid sense of individuality, of personality. The pantheistic idea
of a single, sole being, of which all other beings are mere
modalities, was also and equally an offence to him. He saw well the
illusoriness and unfruitfulness of such a universe as Spinoza dreamed.
He saw it to be a vain imagination, a dream-world, "without form and
void," nowhere blossoming into reality. The philosophy of Leibnitz
is equally remote from that of Des Cartes on the one hand, and from
that of Spinoza on the other. He diverges from the former on the
question of substance, which Des Cartes conceived as consisting of
two kinds, one active (thinking) and one passive (extended), but
which Leibnitz conceives to be all and only active. He explodes
Dualism, and resolves the antithesis of matter and spirit by
positing extension as a continuous act instead of a passive mode,
substance as an active force instead of an inert mass,--matter as
substance appearing, communicating,--as the necessary band and
relation of spirits among themselves. [19]

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