GENERAL PRINCIPLES 57 



God or the most Perfect Being is involved in that of 

 an imperfect self-conscious being. Yet Leibniz regards 

 the idea of God as contained, not in the self-conscious 

 being alone, but, in one way or another, in every real 

 being. Thus it is of less consequence for Leibniz than 

 for Descartes that the idea of God is pre-supposed in the 

 consciousness of self. That which is of most importance 

 to Leibniz is that self-consciousness pre-supposes a know- 

 ledge of necessary truths in general. Thus, for Leibniz, 

 God is not merely the eternally necessary Being whose 

 very idea (or essence) involves existence and who is in 

 that way the ground of existence to all other things : He 

 is also the greatest of beings, the highest of Monads 

 (Monas monadum ] ), whose own existence is one among 

 many necessary and eternal truths. l We must not 

 imagine, as some do, that eternal truths, being dependent 

 on God, are arbitrary and depend on His will, as Des- 

 cartes, and afterwards Monsieur Poiret, appear to have 

 held 2 .' There are truths or facts which are dependent 

 on the will of God, but these are not necessaiy and 

 eternal. 



The Kinds of Truth according to Leibniz. Necessary and 

 eternal Truths and contingent Truths. 



Accordingly as, on Leibniz's view, the self-conscious 

 being has not a primary and independent reality, based 

 on a complete difference in kind between itself and other 

 beings, so the special kind of knowledge (that of eternal 

 and necessary truths) which belongs to a self-conscious 

 being is not to be regarded as the only absolutely certain 

 truth, to the form of which all other real knowledge 

 must be reduced. ' There are two kinds of truths, those 

 of reasoning and those of fact V The former are the 

 eternal and necessary truths, the latter are contingent. 



1 Giordano Bruno, as well as Leibniz, speaks of God as Monas 

 monadum. 



Monadology, 46. 3 Ibid. 33. 



