154 INTRODUCTION 



understood without the other. Leibniz from his earliest 

 days had been a vast reader of books, and his erudition 

 tempered his imaginative optimism with reverence and 

 caution. Thus his philosophizing most often takes the form 

 of hypothesis or suggestion rather than that of dogma or 

 demonstration. In the Kantian sense his philosophy is, 

 of course, * dogmatic ' and not ' critical ' ; but to some 

 extent he foreshadows the ' critical spirit V As a thinker, 

 he counts as foreign to him nothing that men have 

 thought, and his ideal philosophy would be a philosophy 

 which says clearly all that all previous thinkers have 

 stammeringly tried to say. So people have called him an 

 'eclectic,' and possibly his fame has suifered from the 

 imputation. But there is no lack of originality in the 

 * metaphysical romance 2 ' he brings us, for he is to be 

 called an eclectic mainly in contrast with the Cartesian 

 extremists, who repudiated all obligation to the past. 

 While convinced of the value of his own hypotheses, 

 Leibniz rather glories in his indebtedness, rejoicing to 

 find himself in the philosophic succession. 'I despise 

 almost nothing,' he says, 'except judicial astrology and 

 trickeries of that kind 3 .' 'It happens somehow that the 

 thoughts of other people are usually not displeasing to me, 

 and I appreciate them all, though in divers degrees 4 .' 

 ' There is as much or more reason to beware of those who, 

 most often through ambition, claim to put forth something 

 new as to mistrust old impressions. And after having 

 devoted a great deal of thought both to the old and the 

 new, I have come to the conclusion that most of the 

 received doctrines can be taken in a right sense. So that 



1 'In Leibniz the dogmatic philosophy comes in all points so 

 near to the critical that only one step is needed to rise from the 

 point of view of the one to that of the other.' K. Fischer, Gesch. 

 d. neueren Phil., vol. ii. ch. 21, i. 



2 Hegel, Gesch. d. Philosophic, vol. iii. p. 408. Kant also speaks of 

 the universe of Leibniz as 'a kind of enchanted world' [eine Art 

 von bezauberter Welt]. Rosenkranz, i. 521 ; Hartenstein, iii. 445. 



3 Lettre a Bourguet (1714), (G. iii. 562). 



4 Specimen Dynamicum (1695) (G. Math. vi. 236). 



