ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ'S PHILOSOPHY 163 



And as we have seen *, the sufficiency of the reason rests 

 ultimately on the nature of God as perfect in wisdom, 

 goodness, and power. Manifestly there is here a working- 

 out of what is more vaguely implied in Descartes's 

 repeated references to the perfection of the character of 

 God as our warrant for the reality of things. And the 

 argument of Spinoza (however inconsistent it may be) is 

 based on the conviction that every finite thing must find 

 its place in the one all-embracing system, that is to say, 

 must follow from the nature of God in whom are all 

 perfections. Thus the addition of the principle of suffi- 

 cient reason to that of contradiction is not an entirely 

 novel suggestion on the part of Leibniz, but is an out- 

 growth of what was already involved in the reasonings of 

 his immediate predecessors. It is a step towards the 

 reconciling of their inconsistencies by bringing into clear 

 consciousness a principle which they blindly and imper- 

 fectly employed. 



The Philosophy of Wolff. 



The philosophy of Leibniz suffered grievously at the 

 hands of his immediate disciples 2 . Probably this was 

 inevitable. Few of his writings were published in his 

 lifetime, and his philosophical opinions were dispersed 

 through masses of manuscript which might well be the 

 despair of his friends. And the philosophical system 



J This Introduction, Part ii. p. 66. 



2 'It has been with Leibniz as with several philosophers of 

 antiquity, who might have said : "May God preserve us from our 

 friends ; as for our enemies, we ourselves shall be able to protect 

 ourselves from them." ' Kant, Entdeckung nach der alle neue Kritik 

 der reinen Vernunft durch eine altere entbehrlich gemacht werden soil. 

 Rosenkranz, i. 478 ; Hartenstein, iii. 390. Cf. Wallace, Logic of 

 Hegel (snd ed.) ; Prolegomena, ch. 17. Kant himself in one of his 

 earlier writings (Traume ernes Geistersehers, &c. ; Rosenkranz, vii. 45 ; 

 Hartenstein, iii. 58) speaks of 'Leibniz's amusing idea, according 

 to which we might perhaps swallow in our coffee atoms destined 

 to become human souls.' And a naturalist of the end of last 

 century, Otto F. Muller, thought that he had discovered Monads 

 under the microscope ! 



M 2 



