54 INTRODUCTION 



Self-consciousness in the philosophy of Leibniz is, 

 however, a very different thing from self-consciousness 

 in the philosophy of Descartes. The latter arrives at 

 the self-conscious Ego as the result of a rigorous analysis, 

 whose instrument is doubt *. It is an ultimate fact, the 

 fact of a subject thinking, without regard to any specific 

 object of its thought. Self-consciousness is the bare 

 witness of consciousness to itself, its empty self-con- 

 sistency. In the certainty of self-consciousness Descartes 

 (justifiably or not) finds involved the certainty of God. 

 the Perfect Being, and from this he proceeds to the 

 certainty of the external world and to the principle that 

 clear and distinct ideas are characteristic of self-conscious- 

 ness and are a sufficient warrant for the reality of their 

 objects. For Leibniz, on the other hand, the Ego is 

 not a pure subject, whose essence is immediate self-con- 

 sciousness. No Monad can be a pure subject. ' Not only 

 is it immediately clear to me that I think, but it is quite 



1 Leibniz seems strangely to have missed the significance of 

 Descartes's method of doubt, probably because his interest lay 

 more in Descartes' s doctrines than in his way of reaching them. 

 ' M. Descartes,' he says, ' has acted like the quacks [charlatans] who, 

 in order to attract people and get a sale for their remedies, set up 

 open theatres in which they show farces and other extraordinary, 

 but not very necessary, things. Thus all that he says about the 

 necessity of doubting everything and of treating doubtful things as 

 false has had no other use than to get him a hearing, to raise 

 a comniotion, to draw the crowd by its novelty, and even to get 

 himself contradicted, that he may be the more famous. But he 

 has taken care to reserve for himself a way of rationally explaining 

 his paradoxes.' Foucher de Careil, Nouvelles Lettres et Opuscules inedits, 

 p. 12. Leibniz elsewhere speaks of Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum and 

 his method of doubt as ' trappings to appeal to the people ' (phaleras 

 adpopulum), and he pictures Descartes as * throwing balls to plebeian 

 minds to play with,' so that 'they seem to have got something 

 great, like boys with a nut or a bean' (G. iv. 327). We must, of 

 course, remember how different is the problem of Descartes from 

 that of Leibniz. Descartes lays special stress upon self- conscious- 

 ness because he regards himself as having found a principle by 

 means of which to distinguish absolutely the true from the false or 

 doubtful. On the other hand, for Leibniz as for Spinoza, the 

 problem of philosophy is not primarily a problem of knowledge. 

 Leibniz's theory of knowledge follows from his answer to the 

 question ' What in reality is substance ? ' 



