

ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ S PHILOSOPHY 155 



I wish clever men would seek to satisfy their ambition 

 rather by building and making progress than by going 

 back and destroying 1 .' 'This system' [Leibniz's own] 

 ' appears to combine Plato with Democritus, Aristotle 

 with Descartes, the Scholastics with the moderns, theology 

 and ethics with reason. It seems to take the best from 

 all sides, and then to go further than any one has yet 

 gone. ... I see now what Plato meant when he regarded 

 matter as an imperfect and transitory thing ; what Aris- 

 totle intended by his entelechy; what is that promise 

 of another life, which Democritus himself made, accord- 

 ing to Pliny ; how far the Sceptics were right in crying 

 out against the senses ; how animals are automata, as 

 Descartes says, and have nevertheless souls and feeling, as 

 people think ; how a rational explanation is to be given of 

 the views of those who attribute life and perception to all 

 things such people as Cardan, Campanella, and (better 

 than these) the late Countess of Conway (a Platonist), and 

 our friend, the late M. Francois Mercure Van Helmont 

 (though otherwise bristling with unintelligible paradoxes), 

 with his friend, the late Mr. Henry More V 



1 Nouveaux Essais, bk. i. ch. 2, 21 (E. 219 a ; Gr. v. 92). 



z Ibid. bk. i. ch. i (E. 205 a ; G. v. 64). Leibniz might have 

 added the name of Spinoza, who says that ' all individual bodies 

 are animate, though in different degrees.' Ethics, Pt. ii. prop. 13, 

 Scholium. Cf. Lettre a Basnage (1698) (E. 153 b ; G. iv. 523) : When 

 we penetrate deeply into things, we observe more reason than 

 would be believed in most of the sects of the philosophers. The 

 lack of reality in the things of sense, according to the Sceptics ; 

 the Pythagorean and Platonist reduction of everything to har- 

 monies, numbers, ideas, and perceptions; the "One" and even the 

 one Whole of Parmenides and Plotinus, without any Spinozism ; 

 the Stoic connexion, compatible with the spontaneity of others ; 

 the vital philosophy of the Cabbalists and Hermetics, who attri- 

 bute feeling to everything ; the forms and entelechies of Aristotle 

 and the Scholastics ; and on the other hand the mechanical 

 explanation of all particular phenomena, according to Democritus 

 and the moderns these are all combined together as in a centre 

 of perspective, viewed from which the object (confused from every 

 other point of view) reveals its regularity and the harmony of its 

 parts. We have failed to accomplish this by our sectarian spirit, 

 limiting ourselves by rejecting others.' The writings of Leibniz 

 are full of similar passages. 



