According to the other, nature is something essentially dynamic and active. Change according to law is its very essence. Form, arrangement are only the results of this internal principle. And so to Leibniz, extension and the spatial aspects of physical existence were only secondary, they were phenomenal. The primary, the real fact was motion.
The considerations which led him to this conclusion are simple enough. It is the fact already mentioned, that explanation always consists in reducing phenomena to a law of motion which connects them. Descartes himself had not succeeded in writing his physics without everywhere using the conception of motion. But motion cannot be got out of the idea of extension. Geometry will not give us activity. What is this, except virtually to admit the insufficiency of purely statical conceptions? Leibniz found himself confirmed in this position by the fact that the more logical of the followers of Descartes had recognized that motion is a superfluous intruder, if extension be indeed the essence of matter, and therefore had been obliged to have recourse to the immediate activity of God as the cause of all changes. But this, as Leibniz said, was simply to give up the very idea of mechanical explanation, and to fall back into the purely general explanations of scholasticism.
This is not the place for a detailed exposition of the ideas of Leibniz regarding matter, motion, and extension. We need here only recognize that he saw in motion the final reality of the physical universe. But what about motion? To many, perhaps the majority, of minds to-day it seems useless or absurd, or both, to ask any question about motion. It is simply an ultimate fact, to which all other facts are to be reduced. We are so familiar with it as a solution of all physical problems that we are confused, and fail to recognize it when it appears in the guise of a problem. But, I repeat, philosophy cannot stop with facts, however ultimate. It must also know something about the meaning, the significance, in short the ideal bearing, of facts. From the point of view of philosophy, motion has a certain function in the economy of the universe; it is, as Aristotle saw, something ideal.
The name of Aristotle suggests the principles which guided Leibniz in his interpretation of the fact of motion. The thought of Aristotle moves about the two poles of potentiality and actuality. Potentiality is not mere capacity; it is being in an undeveloped, imperfect stage. Actuality is, as the word suggests, activity. Anything is potential in so far as it does not manifest itself in action; it is actual so far as it does thus show forth its being. Now, movement, or change in its most general sense, is that by which the potential comes to the realization of its nature, and functions as an activity. Motion, then, is not an ultimate fact, but is subordinate. It exists for an end. It is that by which existence realizes its idea; that is, its proper type of action.
Now Leibniz does not formally build upon these distinctions; and yet he is not very far removed from Aristotle. Motion, he is never weary of repeating, means force, means energy, means activity. To say that the essence of nature is motion, is to say that the natural world finally introduces us to the supremacy of action. Reality is activity. Substance c’est l’action. That is the key-note and the battle-cry of the Leibnizian philosophy. Motion is that by which being expresses its nature, fulfils its purpose, reveals its idea. In short, the specific scientific conception of motion is by Leibniz transformed into the philosophic conception of force, of activity. In motion he sees evidence of the fact that the universe is radically dynamic.
In the applicability of mathematics to the interpretation of nature Leibniz finds witness to the continuity and order of the world. We have become so accustomed to the fact that mathematics may be directly employed for the discussion and formulation of physical investigations that we forget what is implied in it. It involves the huge assumption that the world answers to reason; so that whatever the mind finds to be ideally true may be taken for granted to be physically true also. But in those days, when the correlation of the laws of the world and the laws of mathematical reasoning was a fresh discovery, this aspect of the case could not be easily lost sight of.
In fact it was this correlation which filled the Zeitgeist of the sixteenth century with the idea that it had a new organ for the penetration of nature, a new sense for learning its meaning. Descartes gives the following as the origin of his philosophy: “The long chains of simple and easy reasons which geometers employ, even in their most complex demonstrations, made me fancy that all things which are the objects of human knowledge are similarly interdependent.” To Leibniz also mathematics seemed to give a clew to the order, the interdependence, the harmonious relations, of the world.
In this respect the feeling of Plato that God geometrizes found an echoing response in Leibniz. But the latter would hardly have expressed it in the same way. He would have preferred to say that God everywhere uses the infinitesimal calculus. In the applicability of the calculus to the discussion of physical facts, Leibniz saw two truths reflected,—that everything that occurs has its reason, its dependent connection upon something else, and that all is continuous and without breaks. While the formal principles of his logic are those of identity and contradiction, his real principles are those of sufficient reason and of continuity. Nature never makes leaps; everything in nature has a sufficient reason why it is as it is: these are the philosophic generalizations which Leibniz finds hidden in the applicability of mathematics to physical science. Reason finds itself everywhere expressed in nature; and the law of reason is unity in diversity, continuity.
Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions are fundamentally mathematical laws,—laws of reason. Hence force, activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean Intelligence. Furthermore, as the fundamental law of intelligence is the production of difference in unity, the primary law of physical change must be the manifestation of this unity in difference,—or, as Leibniz interpreted it, continuity. In nature there are no breaks, neither of quantity nor of quality nor of relationship. The full force of this law we shall see later.
Such an idea can hardly be distinguished from the idea of growth or development; one passes naturally into the other. Thus it is equally proper to say that the third scientific influence, the conception of organism and growth, is dominant in the Leibnizian thought, or that this is swallowed up and absorbed in the grand idea of continuity. The law of animal and vegetable life and the law of the universe are identified. The substance of the universe is activity; the law of the universe is interdependence. What is this but to say that the universe is an organic whole? Its activity is the manifestation of life,—nay, it is life. The laws of its activity reveal that continuity of development, that harmony of inter-relation, which are everywhere the marks of life. The final and fundamental notion, therefore, by which Leibniz interprets the laws of physics and mathematics is that of Life. This is his regnant category. It is “that higher and metaphysical source” from which the very existence and principles of mechanism flow. The perpetual and ubiquitous presence of motion reveals the pulsations of Life; the correlation, the rationality, of these motions indicate the guiding presence of Life. This idea is the alpha and omega of his philosophy.
Chapter III.
The Problem, and its Solution.
Leibniz, like every great man, absorbed into himself the various thoughts of his time, and in absorbing transformed them. He brought into a focus of brilliancy the diffused lights of truth shining here and there. He summed up in a pregnant and comprehensive category the scattered principles of his age. Yet we are not to suppose that Leibniz considered these various ideas one by one, and then patched them into an artificial unity of thought. Philosophies are not manufactured piecemeal out of isolated and fragmentary thoughts; they grow from a single root, absorbing from their environment whatever of sustenance offers itself, and maturing in one splendid fruit of spiritual truth. It is
