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sum up, it may be doubted whether we have more to learn from Leibniz’s successes or from his failures. Leibniz’s positive significance for us is in his clear recognition of the problems of modern philosophy, and in his perception of the isolated elements of their solution. His negative significance is in his clinging to a method which allowed him only to juxtapose these elements without forming of them a true synthesis. There are a number of sides from which we may state Leibniz’s realization of the problem. Perhaps that which distinguishes Leibniz most clearly from Locke is their respective treatments of the relation of the physical to the spiritual, or, as the question presented itself mainly to them, of the “natural” to the “supernatural.” To Locke the supernatural was strictly miraculous; it was, from our standpoint, mere power, or will. It might indeed be rational, but this reason was incapable of being apprehended by us. Its distinction from the finite was so great that it could be conceived only as something preceding and succeeding the finite in time, and meanwhile as intercalating itself arbitrarily here and there into the finite; as, for example, in the relation of soul and body, in the production of sensation, etc. In a word, Locke thought that the ends of philosophy, and with it of religion and morals, could be attained only by a complete separation of the “natural” and the “supernatural.” Leibniz, on the other hand, conceived the aim of philosophy to be the demonstration of their harmony. This is evidenced by his treatment of the relations of the infinite and finite, of matter and spirit, of mechanical and final causation. And he found the sought-for harmony in the fact that the spiritual is the reason, purpose, and function of the natural. The oft-quoted words of Lotze express the thought of Leibniz: “The mechanical is unbounded in range, but is subordinate in value.” We cannot find some things that occur physically, and others that occur supernaturally; everything that occurs has its sufficient mechanical antecedents, but all that occurs has its significance, its purpose, in something that does not occur, but that eternally is—Reason. The mechanical and the spiritual are not realms which here and there come into outward contact. They are related as the conditioned and the conditioning. That, and not the idea of an artificial modus vivendi, is the true meaning of the pre-established harmony.
In other words, Leibniz’s great significance for us is the fact that, although he accepted in good faith, and indeed as himself a master in its methods, the results and principles of physical science, he remained a teleological idealist of the type of Aristotle. But I have not used the right words. It was not in spite of his acceptance of the scientific view of the world that he retained his faith in the primacy of purpose and reason. On the contrary, he was an idealist because of his science, because only by the idea of an all-conditioning spiritual activity could he account for and make valid scientific conceptions; he was a teleologist, because natural processes, with their summing up in the notion of causality, were meaningless except as manifesting an immanent purpose.
There are other more technical ways of stating the bearing of Leibniz’s work. We may say that he realized that the problem of philosophy consisted in giving due value to the notions of individuality and universality, of identity and difference, or of the real and the ideal. In developing these ideas, however, we should only be repeating what has already been said, and so we may leave the matter here. On the negative side we need only recall what was said a few pages back regarding the incompatibility of Leibniz’s method—the scholastic formal logic—with the content of his philosophy. The attempt to find a formal criterion of truth was hopeless; it was worse than fruitless, for it led to such an interpretation of concrete truths as to deprive them of their significance and as to land Leibniz in involved contradictions.
To write a complete account of the influence of Leibniz’s philosophy would be too large a task for these pages. If we were to include under this head all the ramifications of thought to which Leibniz stimulated, directly and indirectly, either by stating truths which some one worked out or by stating errors which incited some one to new points of view, we should have to sketch German philosophy since his time,—and not only the professional philosophy, but those wide aspects of thought which were reflected in Herder, Lessing, and Goethe. It is enough to consider him as the forerunner of Kant. It has become so customary to represent Kant as working wholly on the problem which Hume presented, that his great indebtedness to Leibniz is overlooked. Because Hume aroused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, it is supposed that Kant threw off the entire influence of the Leibnizian thought as vain dreams of his sleep. Such a representation is one-sided. It is truer to state that Hume challenged Kant to discover the method by which he could justify the results of Leibniz. In this process, the results, no doubt, took on a new form: results are always relative to method; but Kant never lost sight of the results. In the main, he accepted the larger features of the Leibnizian conclusions, and, taught by Hume of the insufficiency of the method that Leibniz followed, searched for a method which should guarantee them.
This aspect of Kant appears more fully in his lesser and somewhat controversial writings than in his classic works: and this, no doubt, is one reason that his indebtedness is so often overlooked. His close relation to Leibniz appears most definitely in his brochure entitled “Concerning a Discovery which renders Unnecessary all Critique of Pure Reason.” A Wolffian, Eberhard by name, had “made the discovery” (to use Kant’s words) “that the Leibnizian philosophy contained a critique of reason just as well as the modern, and accordingly contained everything that is true in the latter, and much else in addition.” In his reply to this writing, Kant takes the position that those who claimed to be Leibnizians simply repeated the words of Leibniz without penetrating into his spirit, and that consequently they misrepresented him on every important point. He, Kant, on the other hand, making no claim to use the terminology of Leibniz, was his true continuator, since he had only changed the doctrine of the latter so as to make it conform to the true intent of Leibniz, by removing its self-contradictions. He closes: “‘The Critique of Pure Reason’ may be regarded as the real apology for Leibniz, even against his own professed followers.”
Kant, in particular, names three points in which he is the true follower of Leibniz. The professed disciples of the latter insisted that the law of sufficient reason was an objective law, a law of nature. But, says Kant, it is so notorious, so self-evident, that no one can make a new discovery through this principle, that Leibniz can have meant it only as subjective. “For what does it mean to say that over and above the principle of contradiction another principle must be employed? It means this: that, according to the principle of contradiction, only that can be known which is already contained in the notion of the object; if anything more is to be known, it must be sought through the use of a special principle, distinct from that of contradiction. Since this last kind of knowledge is that of synthetic principles, Leibniz means just this: besides the principle of contradiction, or that of analytic judgments, there must be another, that of sufficient reason, for synthetic judgments. He thus pointed out, in a new and remarkable manner, that certain investigations in metaphysics were still to be made.” In other words, Kant, by his distinction of analytic and synthetic judgments, with their respective principles and spheres, carried out the idea of Leibniz regarding the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.
The second point concerns the relation of monads to material bodies. Eberhard, like the other professed Leibnizians, interpreted Leibniz as saying that corporeal bodies, as composite, are actually made up out of monads, as simple. Kant, on the other hand, saw clearly that Leibniz was not thinking of a relation of composition, but of condition. “He did not mean the material world, but the substrate, the intellectual world which lies in the idea of reason, and in which everything must be thought as consisting of simple substances.” Eberhard’s process, he says, is to begin with sense-phenomena, to find a simple element as a part of the sense-perceptions, and then to present this simple element as if it were spiritual and equivalent to the monad of Leibniz. Kant claims to follow the thought of Leibniz in regarding the simple not as an element in the sensuous, but as something super-sensuous, the ground of the sensuous. Leibniz’s mistake was that, not having worked out clearly the respective limits of the principles of identity and of sufficient reason, he supposed that we had a direct intellectual intuition of this super-sensuous, when in reality it is unknowable.
The third group of statements concerns the principle of pre-established harmony. “Is it possible,” asks Kant, “that Leibniz meant by this doctrine to assert the mere coincidence of two substances wholly independent