The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  The inherent principles, in Leibniz’ judgment, include all “necessary truths, such as are found in pure mathematics,” 38 for it is the mind, not sensation, that supplies the principle of necessity; everything sensory is individual and contingent, and gives us, at best, repeated sequence but not necessary sequence or cause. 39 (Locke had conceded this. 40) Leibniz considered innate all our instincts, our preference of pleasure to pain, and all the laws of reason 41—though these become clear only with experience. Among the innate laws of thought two are especially basic: the principle of contradiction—that contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time (“if A is a circle it is not a square”); and the principle of sufficient reason—“that nothing happens without a reason why it should be so rather than otherwise.” 42 Human intelligence, Leibniz thought, differs from animal knowledge by deducing general ideas from particular experiences through the use of innate principles of reason; brutes are pure empirics, guiding themselves solely by examples; “so far as we can judge of them, they never attain to the formation of necessary propositions.” 43

  The principle of sufficient reason suffices to “demonstrate the being of a God, and all the other parts of metaphysics or natural theology.” 44 In this sense our idea of God is innate, though in some minds or tribes the idea may be unconscious or confused; and we may say the same of the idea of immortality. 45 The moral sense is innate, not in its specific content or judgments, which may vary in time and place, but as consciousness of a difference between right and wrong; this consciousness is universal. 46

  In Leibniz’ psychology the mind is active not only as entering by its structure and functioning into the making of every idea, but also in the incessant continuance of its activity. Using the word think in Descartes’ broad sense as including all mental operations, Leibniz agreed with the Cartesians that the mind is always thinking, whether awake, unconscious, or asleep. “A state without thought in the soul, and an absolute repose in the body, appear to me equally contrary to nature, and without example in the world.” 47 Some mental operations are subconscious; “it is a great error to believe that there is no perception in the soul besides those of which it is conscious.” 48 It is with such propositions in Leibniz that modern psychology began its efforts to delve into what some students called unconscious mind, and what esprits forts considered to be merely cerebral or other bodily processes that did not evoke consciousness.

  Leibniz has much to say about the relation between body and soul, but there he leaves psychology, soars into metaphysics, and asks us to see all the world as psychophysical monads, like ourselves.

  V. MONADS

  When he was in Vienna in 1714 he met Eugene of Savoy, who, with Marlborough, had saved Europe from subjection to Louis XIV. The Prince asked the philosopher for a brief statement of his philosophy in a form intelligible to a general. Leibniz responded by composing a compact treatise of ninety paragraphs, which he left among his papers at his death. A German translation was published in 1720, but the original French text was not printed till 1839, and then it was the editor who christened it La Monadologie. Leibniz could have taken the term monad from Giordano Bruno, 49 or from Frans (son of the chemist J. B.) van Helmont, 50 who used the word to describe the minute “seeds” which alone were directly created by God, and which developed into all the forms of matter and life. An English physician, Francis Glisson, had attributed not only force but instinct and ideas to all substances (1672). A similar theory had germinated in Leibniz’ roving and receptive mind since 1686. He may have been influenced by the recent work of microscopists, who had shown such throbbing life in the smallest cells. Leibniz concluded that “there is a world of created beings—living things, animals . . . , souls . . . , in the least part of matter.” 51 Every portion of matter may be conceived as a pond full of fishes, and every drop of blood in one of these microscopic fishes is another pond full of fishes, and so on ad infinitum. He was moved—as Pascal had been appalled—by the indefinite divisibility of every extended thing.

  This endless divisibility, Leibniz suggested, is a puzzle arising from our conception of reality as matter, therefore as extended, therefore as divisible ad nauseam. If we consider the ultimate reality as energy, and conceive the world as composed of centers of force, the mystery of divisibility vanishes, because force, like thought, does not imply extension. So he rejected the atoms of Democritus as the ultimate components of the universe, and replaced them with monads, unextended units of force; he defined substance not as matter but as energy. (Up to this point Leibniz’ conception was quite in accord with twentieth-century physics.) “Matter” is everywhere instinct with motion, activity, and life. Every monad feels or perceives; it has inchoate or incipient mind, in the sense that it is susceptible—and responds—to external changes.

  We shall understand the monads better if we think of them “in imitation of the notion that we have of souls.” 52 As each soul is “a simple, separate Person,” 53 a solitary ego, solus contra mundum, fighting its way by its own internal will against everything outside it, so each monad is essentially alone, a separate, independent center of force against all other centers of force; reality is a universe of individual powers, unified and harmonized only through the laws of the whole, or God. As every soul is different from all others, so is every monad unique; in the entire cosmos there are no two beings completely alike, for their differences constitute their individuality; two things having all the same qualities would be indistinguishable, identical, one (“the law of indiscernibles”). 54 As each soul feels or perceives the reality surrounding it, and, ever less clearly, the reality progressively distant from it, but feels all reality in some degree, so each monad feels, however confusedly and unconsciously, the whole universe; in this way it is a mirror more or less obscurely reflecting and representing the world. And as no individual mind can really look into another mind, so no single monad can see into another; it has no window or other opening for such direct communication; and therefore it cannot directly produce any change in any other monad.

  The monads do change, for change is essential to their life; but the changes come from their own inner striving. 55 For just as each self is desire and will, so each monad contains—is—an inner purpose and will, an effort to develop; this is the “entelechy” that Aristotle spoke of as the core of every life; in this sense [as Schopenhauer was to say] force and will are two forms or degrees of the same fundamental reality. 56 There is an immanent teleology in nature: there is in everything a seeking, an “appetition,” a guiding, molding purpose, even though that purpose, that will, acts within the limits, and by means, of mechanical law. Just as, in ourselves, the bodily movement is the visible and mechanical expression of an internal will or desire, so in the monads the mechanical process that we see from without is only the outer form and shell of an inner force: “That which is exhibited mechanically, or by extension, in matter, is concentrated dynamically and monadically in the entelechy [or inner striving] itself.” 57 In our confused perception we identify external things with “matter” because we see their outer mechanism only; we do not, as in introspection, see the inner and formative vitality. In this philosophy the passive and helpless atoms of the materialists give place to monads, or units, that are living centers of individuality and force; the world ceases to be a dead machine, and becomes the stage of diverse and palpitating life.

  In that diversity the most important feature is the degree in which the “mind” of the monad is conscious. All monads have mind, in the sense of sensitivity and response; but not all mind is conscious. Even we marvelous human beings go through many mental processes without consciousness, as in dreams; or as when, in our intense attention to certain aspects of a situation, we are not aware that we are perceiving many other elements in the scene—elements which may nevertheless be deposited in memory, enter into our dreams, or emerge from hidden corners of the mind into later consciousness; or as when, conscious of the roar and hiss of the surf, we do not realize that each
wave, and each particle of each wave, is beating upon our ears to produce a thousand individual impressions that become our hearing of the sea. So the simplest monads feel and perceive everything about them, but so confusedly that they have no consciousness. In plants the feelings become clearer and more specialized, and lead to more specific responses. In the monad that is the soul of an animal the echoing perceptions become memories, whose interplay begets consciousness. Man is a colony of monads [cells?], each with its own hunger, needs, and purposes; but these particles become a unified community of living organisms under the direction of a dominating monad which is man’s entelechy and soul. 58 “When this soul is raised to the level of reason, it is . . . reckoned as mind,” 59 and rises in rank in the measure of its perceiving necessary relations and eternal truths; when it perceives the order and mind of the universe it becomes the mirror of God. God, the Prime Monad, is pure and fully conscious Mind, free from mechanism and body. 60

  The most difficult aspect of this philosophy is Leibniz’ theory of “preestablished harmony.” What is the relation between the inner life of a monad and its outward manifestation, or material shell? And how shall we explain the apparent interaction of physical body and spiritual mind in man? Descartes had delegated this problem helplessly to the pineal gland; Spinoza had answered it by denying any separation or interaction of matter and mind, since these were, in his view, merely the outside and inside aspects of one process and reality. Leibniz restored the problem by thinking of the two aspects as separate and distinct; he denied their interaction, but ascribed the simultaneity of the physical and the mental processes as due to a continuous collusion marvelously prearranged by God:

  The soul follows its own laws, and the body its own likewise, and they accord by virtue of the harmony pre-established among all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe. 61 . . . Bodies act as though, per impossibile, there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and both act as if each influenced the other. 62 . . . I am . . . asked how it happens that God is not content to produce all the thoughts and modifications of the soul without these useless bodies which the soul (it is said) can neither move nor know. The answer is easy. It is that it was God’s will that there should be a greater rather than a lesser number of substances, and He found it good that these modifications should correspond to something outside. 63

  Suspecting that this debonair exploitation of deity as a substitute for thought might not win universal applause, Leibniz embellished it with the occasionalism and timepieces of Geulincx: body and mind, each operating independently of the other and yet in puzzling harmony, are like two clocks so skillfully constructed, wound, and set that they tick off the seconds and strike the hours in perfect agreement, without any interaction or mutual influence; so the physical and psychical processes, though quite independent, and never acting upon each other, accord through a “harmony pre-established by a divine anticipatory artifice.” 64

  Let us assume that what Leibniz had in view, but did not care to say, was that the apparently separate but synchronous processes of mechanism and life, of action and thought, are one and the same process, seen externally as matter, internally as mind. But to have said this would have been to repeat Spinoza, and share his fate.

  VI. WAS GOD JUST?

  This need to put theological clothing upon philosophical nudities led Leibniz to write the book that drew the ire and wit of Voltaire, and almost lost a really profound thinker in the caricature of Professor Pangloss defending the best of all possible worlds. The only complete philosophical work published by Leibniz in his lifetime was called Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme, et l’origine du mal (1710)—almost as comforting a promissory note as Descartes’ Principles of First Philosophy, in Which are Demonstrated the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul (1641). “Theodicy,” of course, meant the justice, or justification, of God.

  This book, like the others, had an occasional origin. In an article (“Hieronymus Rorarius”) in the Dictionnaire historique et critique Bayle, while expressing great admiration for Leibniz, questioned the philosopher’s view that faith can be reconciled with reason, or man’s freedom with God’s omnipotence, or earthly evil with divine goodness and power. We had better, said Bayle, give up the idea of proving religious creeds; it merely brings the difficulties into clearer light. Leibniz replied in an essay (1698) contributed to Jacques Basnage’s journal, Histoire des ouvrages des savants. In the second edition of his Dictionary Bayle added to the article on Rorarius a substantial note again hailing Leibniz as “that great philosopher,” but pointing out further obscurities, especially in the theory of preestablished harmony. Leibniz sent (1702) his rejoinder directly to Bayle, but did not print it. In that same year he wrote again to the Rotterdam scholar, complimenting him on his “striking reflections” and “boundless researches.” 65 Few episodes in the history of philosophy are so pleasant as the mutual courtesy in this exchange of ideas. Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, expressed her desire to know Leibniz’ answers to Bayle’s doubts. He was preparing such a statement when news came to him that Bayle had died. He revised and extended his replies, and published them as the Théodicée. He was now sixty-four years old, felt the nearness of the “Great Perhaps,” and may have longed to believe in the justice of God to man. How had it come about that a world created by an omnipotent and benevolent deity had been sullied with such martial massacres, political corruption, human cruelty and suffering, earthquakes, famines, poverty, and disease?

  The “preliminary dissertation on the confronting of faith with reason” described reason and the Bible as being both of them divine revelations, and therefore unlikely to contradict each other. Bayle had wondered how a good God, presumably foreseeing all “the fruit thereof,” could have allowed the temptation of Eve; Leibniz answered that to make man capable of morality God had to give him free will, and therefore freedom to sin. It is true that free will seems incompatible with both science and theology: science sees everywhere the rule of invariable law, and human freedom seems lost in God’s foreknowledge and predestination of all events. But (said Leibniz) we are obstinately and directly conscious that we are free. Though we cannot prove this freedom, we must accept it as a prerequisite to any sense of moral responsibility, and as the only alternative to viewing man as a ridiculously helpless physiological machine.

  As to the existence of God, Leibniz is content with traditional Scholastic arguments. We conceive a perfect being, and since existence is a necessary element in perfection, a perfect being must exist. There must be a necessary and uncaused being behind all proximate causes and contingent events. It is inconceivable that the grandeur and order of nature should have any other source than a Supreme Intelligence. The Creator must contain in Himself, in an infinite degree, the power, knowledge, and will discoverable in His creatures. Divine design and cosmic mechanism are not contradictory: Providence uses mechanism its wonders to perform; and God can interrupt the world machine now and then to work a miracle or two. 66

  Of course the soul is immortal. Death, like birth, is only a change of form in an assemblage of monads; the inherent soul and energy remain. Soul, except in God, is always attached to body, and body to soul; but there will be a resurrection of the body as well as of the soul. 67 (Leibniz is here a good Catholic.) Below man the immortality of the soul is impersonal [merely a redistribution of energy?]; only the rational soul of man will enjoy a conscious immortality.

  Good and evil are human terms, defined according to our pleasure and pain; these terms cannot be applied to the universe without presuming for man an omniscience possible only to God. “Imperfection in the part may be required for a greater perfection in the whole” 68; so sin is an evil, but is a result of free will, which is a good; and even the sin of Adam and Eve was in some sense a felix culpa, a happy fault, since it resulted in the coming of Christ. 69 “There is in the universe . . . no chaos, no confusion, save in
appearance.” 70 The afflictions of men “contribute to the greater good of those who suffer them.” 71 Even