STATEMENT OF LEIBNIZ^ PHILOSOPHY 147 



roundabout way an Umweg and so they fail to achieve 

 their end. ' The stone goes by the most direct, but not 

 always the best way towards the centre of the earth, not 

 being able to foresee that it will meet rocks on which it 

 will be broken, while it would have more nearly attained 

 its end, if it had had the intelligence and the means to 

 turn aside. Even thus, going straight towards present 

 pleasure, we sometimes fall over the precipice of misery 1 .' 

 'We must not abandon those old axioms that the will 

 follows the greatest good it perceives and shuns the 

 greatest evil. That the truest good is so little sought 

 after is mainly due to this, that in matters and on occa- 

 sions in which the senses have very little influence, most 

 of our thoughts are, so to speak, insensible [sourdes] (I call 

 them in Latin, cogitationes caecae [blind thoughts]), that is 

 to say, they are void of perception and feeling and consist 

 in the bare use of symbols, like the work of those who 

 make calculations in algebra, without looking from time 

 to time at the geometrical figures. In this respect words 

 usually have the same eifect as arithmetical or algebraic 

 symbols. We often reason in words, hardly having the 

 object in mind at all. Now this knowledge cannot move 

 us : something vivid is required that we may be moved. 

 Yet it is thus that men most often think of God, of 

 virtue, of happiness; they speak and reason without 

 definite ideas. Not that they cannot have these ideas ; 

 for they are in their minds. But they do not give them- 

 selves the trouble of carrying on the analysis of their 

 ideas 2 .' 



1 Nouveaux Essais, bk. ii. ch. 21, 36 (E. 259 a ; G. v. 175). 



2 Ibid. bk. ii. ch. 21, 35 (E. 257 a ; G-. v. 171). As this 

 passage suggests, Leibniz is full of moral optimism. Cf. 38 of 

 the same chapter (E. 260 a ; G. v. 177^): 'When I consider how 

 much ambition and avarice can effect in all those who once 

 set themselves in this line of life, which is almost entirely without 



some happy revolution of the human race were some day to give 

 it vogue and make it fashionable.' 



L 2 



