442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or the other of two things may happen, is unthinkable. The brain- 

 molecules can only move in the determined way ; and, if one of them 

 should wander from its place or path without an adequate cause, it 

 would be as great a wonder as if Jupiter should break out from its 

 orbit and throw the planetary system into confusion. If, as monism 

 conceives, our conceptions, efforts, and volitions are really incompre- 

 hensible, yet necessary and unequivocal companion-manifestations of 

 the movements and environments of our brain-molecules, there is evi- 

 dently no freedom of the will. To monism the world is a mechanism, 

 in which there is no place for free-will. 



Leibnitz was the first to whom the material world was presented 

 in this form. His mechanical view was quite the same as ours. He 

 was acquainted with the persistence of energy, although he was not 

 able to follow it through all the molecular processes, as we are, and 

 stood toward collective molecular processes as we stand toward single 

 ones. Inasmuch as Leibnitz also firmly believed in a spiritual world, 

 brought the ethical nature of man within the circle of his views, and 

 was on the best of terms with positive religion, it is well to inquire 

 what he believed concerning free-will, and how he was able to reconcile 

 it with the mechanical view of the world. 



Leibnitz was obliged by his whole teaching to be an absolute de- 

 terminist. He accepted two substances as created by God, the material 

 world and the world of his monads. One can not act upon the other, 

 but the processes go on in both under an unalterable, Predetermined 

 necessity, quite independent of each other, but keeping an exact, har- 

 monious step ; the mathematically calculable oscillations of the world- 

 machine, and, in the soul-monads appertaining to each animated indi- 

 vidual, the conceptions that correspond with the apparent sensual im- 

 pressions, volitions, and conceptions of the host of the monad. The 

 very name of pre-established harmony, which Leibnitz gives to his 

 system, excludes freedom. The conceptions of the monads being 

 mere dream-pictures without mechanical cause or connection with the 

 bodily world, it was easy to explain the subjective conviction of free- 

 dom by supposing that God has so ordered the flow of the concep- 

 tions of the soul-monad that it believes it is free to act. 



On another occasion Leibnitz more closely followed the customary 

 line of thought in allowing to man an appearance of freedom behind 

 which a secret compelling impulse is concealed. Considering in his 

 " Theodicy " the famous paradox, attributed to Buridan, concerning 



u . . . the old gray friend 

 "Which hetween two bundles of hay " 



miserably starved because everything was alike on both sides, and he, 

 as an animal, had no free-will, Leibnitz admitted that, if the case were 

 possible, one would have to decide that he would allow himself to die 

 of hunger ; but he held that the case was fundamentally an instance 



