ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ S PHILOSOPHY 153 



inevitably turned his back upon the history of thought, 

 counting it little better than ' old wives' fables 1 .' 



In Leibniz, on the other hand, there is a double re- 

 action a reaction against the scorn 'of history, and a 

 reaction against the extremes to which modern philosophy 

 had been carried in its opposition to Scholasticism, The 

 whole bent of Leibniz's thought was against sharp and 

 absolute divisions. Thought does not proceed per saltum. 

 In the history of thinking, as in all other history, i the 

 present is laden with the past and full of the future 2 .' 

 Thus, for Leibniz, the Scholastics may have been wrong, 

 but they were not absolutely wrong. And the moderns 

 may be right, but they are not entirely right. Nothing 

 in the past is to be completely set at naught, for out 

 of the past the present has come. The one cannot be 



had carefully studied the ancient philosophers and several of the 

 moderns, he yet affected to appear ignorant of them, in order that 

 he might be regarded as the sole discoverer of his doctrine. In 

 this several of his disciples have too thoroughly followed his 

 example ; for they have imitated his feigned ignorance by culti- 

 vating a real ignorance.' Traite philosophique de la faiblesse de I' Esprit 

 humain, bk. iii. ch. 10. Voltaire also gives point to the general 

 opinion regarding Descartes by the satirical suggestion that 

 Descartes had 'never read anything, not even the Gospels.' Les 

 Systemes, line 37 ; (Euvres Completes, vol. x. p. 169. 



1 It was not only the fact of a revolution in thought that gave 

 rise to the Cartesian disregard of history : the very nature of the 

 revolution itself contributed to this end. The substitution of 

 a mechanical for an a priori dogmatic way of explaining things 

 was inevitably connected with a fresh interest in the study of 

 mathematics, and this led to a preference of mathematical to 

 historical methods in philosophy. Cf. Regies pour la Direction de 

 I' Esprit, (Euvres de Descartes (Cousin), vol. xi. p. 211: 'We shall 

 never be mathematicians, even although we were to know by 

 heart all the demonstrations of other people, if we are not capable 

 of solving by ourselves all kinds of problems. In the same way. 

 though we have read all the reasonings of Plato and Aristotle, that 

 will not make us philosophers if we cannot bring to any question 

 a steady judgment. In such a case we should, indeed, have 

 learned not a science, but history.' Also, p. 209 : ' Eegarding the 

 object of our study we must inquire, not what others have thought 

 nor what we ourselves surmise, but what we can see clearly and 

 manifestly [avec evidence], or what we can deduce with certainty. 

 This is the only way to obtain real knowledge [la science'].' 



2 Cf. Wallace, Logic of Hegel (2nd ed.) ; Prolegomena, pp. 203 sqq. 



