PART IV. 



HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESTIMATE OF THE PHILOSOPHY 

 OF LEIBNIZ. 



Relation of Leibniz to earlier Thinking, especially to the 

 Peripatetic and Atomist Positions. 



No genuine thinker can set himself outside of the 

 philosophic succession. However protestant or revolu- 

 tionary he may be, his problem is always to a great extent 

 determined for him by the systems of the past. Unless 

 intellect is to be called ' bloodless ' these systems may be 

 said to be in his blood ; he could not turn against them if 

 they were not in him, if he had not made them his own. 

 He may cease to seek for truth in the perplexing world, 

 and try to find it in what he takes to be the simplicity 

 and certainty of his own nature ; but, whether he knows 

 it or not, that very nature of his is to a great extent what 

 the tiresome world has made it. He may ignore history 

 or scorn it, but he cannot escape from it. 



The conviction of some such truth as this was very 

 strong in Leibniz. He held it against the fashion of his 

 time. The early part of the seventeenth century was 

 a time when the new felt itself to be so very new, the 

 modern so very modern, that, with the infallibility of 

 youth, it could aiford to despise what seemed ancient, 

 worn-out, and superseded. When ' our moderns ' (as 

 Leibniz frequently calls them) were not contemptuous 

 of older thought they were unconscious of it. In fact, 

 history for them meant a blind tradition, which they had 



