his death in Hanover in 1716 Leibniz had much joy or satisfaction. His best friends were dead; his political ambitions were disappointed; he was suspected of coldness and unfriendliness by the courts both of Berlin and Hanover; Paris and Vienna were closed to him, so far as any wide influence was concerned, by his religious faith; the controversy with the friends of Newton still followed him. He was a man of the most remarkable intellectual gifts, of an energy which could be satisfied only with wide fields of action; and he found himself shut in by narrow intrigue to a petty round of courtly officialism. It is little wonder that the following words fell from his lips: “Germany is the only country in the world that does not know how to recognize the fame of its children and to make that fame immortal. It forgets itself; it forgets its own, unless foreigners make it mindful of its own treasures.” A Scotch friend of Leibniz, who happened to be in Hanover when he died, wrote that Leibniz “was buried more like a robber than what he really was,—the ornament of his country.” Such was the mortal end of the greatest intellectual genius since Aristotle. But genius is not a matter to be bounded in life or in death by provincial courts. Leibniz remains a foremost citizen in that “Kingdom of Spirits” in whose formation he found the meaning of the world.
Chapter II.
The Sources of His Philosophy.
What is true of all men is true of philosophers, and of Leibniz among them. Speaking generally, what they are unconsciously and fundamentally, they are through absorption of their antecedents and surroundings. What they are consciously and reflectively, they are through their reaction upon the influence of heredity and environment. But there is a spiritual line of descent and a spiritual atmosphere; and in speaking of a philosopher, it is with this intellectual heredity and environment, rather than with the physical, that we are concerned. Leibniz was born into a period of intellectual activity the most teeming with ideas, the most fruitful in results, of any, perhaps, since the age of Pericles. We pride ourselves justly upon the activity of our own century, and in diffusion of intellectual action and wide-spread application of ideas the age of Leibniz could not compare with it. But ours is the age of diffusion and application, while his was one of fermentation and birth.
Such a period in its earlier days is apt to be turbid and unsettled. There is more heat of friction than calm light. And such had been the case in the hundred years before Leibniz. But when he arrived at intellectual maturity much of the crudity had disappeared. The troubling of the waters of thought had ceased; they were becoming clarified. Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, each had crystallized something out of that seething and chaotic mass of new ideas which had forced itself into European consciousness. Men had been introduced into a new world, and the natural result had been feelings of strangeness, and the vagaries of intellectual wanderings. But by the day of Leibniz the intellectual bearings had been made out anew, the new mental orientation had been secured.
The marks of this “new spiritual picture of the universe” are everywhere to be seen in Leibniz. His philosophy is the dawning consciousness of the modern world. In it we see the very conception and birth of the modern interpretation of the world. The history of thought is one continuous testimony to the ease with which we become hardened to ideas through custom. Ideas are constantly precipitating themselves out of the realm of ideas into that of ways of thinking and of viewing the universe. The problem of one century is the axiom of another. What one generation stakes its activity upon investigating is quietly taken for granted by the next. And so the highest reach of intellectual inspiration in the sixteenth century is to-day the ordinary food of thought, accepted without an inquiry as to its source, and almost without a suspicion that it has a recent historic origin. We have to go to Bacon or to Leibniz to see the genesis and growth of those ideas which to-day have become materialized into axiomatic points of view and into hard-and-fast categories of thought. In reading Leibniz the idea comes over us in all its freshness that there was a time when it was a discovery that the world is a universe, made after one plan and of one stuff. The ideas of inter-relation, of the harmony of law, of mutual dependence and correspondence, were not always the assumed starting-points of thought; they were once the crowning discoveries of a philosophy aglow and almost intoxicated with the splendor of its far-reaching generalizations. I take these examples of the unity of the world, the continuity and interdependence of all within it, because these are the ideas which come to their conscious and delighted birth in the philosophy of Leibniz. We do not put ourselves into the right attitude for understanding his thought until we remember that these ideas—the commonest tools of our thinking—were once new and fresh, and in their novelty and transforming strangeness were the products of a philosophic interpretation of experience. Except in that later contemporary of Leibniz, the young and enthusiastic Irish idealist, Berkeley, I know of no historic thinker in whom the birth-throes (joyous, however) of a new conception of the world are so evident as in Leibniz. But while in Berkeley what we see is the young man carried away and astounded by the grandeur and simplicity of a “new way of ideas” which he has discovered, what we see in Leibniz is the mature man penetrated throughout his being with an idea which in its unity answers to the unity of the world, and which in its complexity answers, tone to tone, to the complex harmony of the world.
The familiarity of the ideas which we use hides their grandeur from us. The unity of the world is a matter of course with us; the dependent order of all within it a mere starting-point upon which to base our investigations. But if we will put ourselves in the position of Leibniz, and behold, not the new planet, but the new universe, so one, so linked together, swimming into our ken, we shall feel something of the same exultant thrill that Leibniz felt,—an exultation not indeed personal in its nature, but which arises from the expansion of the human mind face to face with an expanding world. The spirit which is at the heart of the philosophy of Leibniz is the spirit which speaks in the following words: “Quin imo qui unam partem materiæ comprehenderet, idem comprehenderet totum universum ob eandem περιχώρησιν quam dixi. Mea principia talia sunt, ut vix a se invicem develli possint. Qui unum bene novit, omnia novit.” It is a spirit which feels that the secret of the universe has been rendered up to it, and which breathes a buoyant optimism. And if we of the nineteenth century have chosen to bewail the complexity of the problem of life, and to run hither and thither multiplying “insights” and points of view till this enthusiastic confidence in reason seems to us the rashness of an ignorance which does not comprehend the problem, and the unity in which Leibniz rested appears cold and abstract beside the manifold richness of the world, we should not forget that after all we have incorporated into our very mental structure the fundamental thoughts of Leibniz,—the thoughts of the rationality of the universe and of the “reign of law.”
What was the origin of these ideas in the mind of Leibniz? What influences in the philosophic succession of thinkers led him in this direction? What agencies acting in the intellectual world about him shaped his ideal reproduction of reality? Two causes above all others stand out with prominence,—one, the discoveries and principles of modern physical science; the other, that interpretation of experience which centuries before had been formulated by Aristotle. Leibniz has a double interest for those of to-day who reverence science and who hold to the historical method. His philosophy was an attempt to set in order the methods and principles of that growing science of nature which even then was transforming the emotional and mental life of Europe; and the attempt was guided everywhere by a profound and wide-reaching knowledge of the history of philosophy. On the first point Leibniz was certainly not alone. Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, each felt in his own way the fructifying touch of the new-springing science, and had attempted under its guidance to interpret the facts of nature and of man. But Leibniz stood alone in his interest in the history of thought. He stands alone indeed till he is greeted by his compeers of the nineteenth century. To Bacon previous philosophy—the Greek, the scholastic—was an “eidol of the theatre.” The human mind must be freed from its benumbing influence. To Descartes it was useless rubbish to be cleared away, that we might get a tabula rasa upon which to make a fresh start. And shall Locke and the empirical English school, or Reid
