ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ'S PHILOSOPHY 167 



holding that motion can be transferred from one to 

 another \ His difficulty is the original Cartesian problem 

 How can a purely thinking substance influence an abso- 

 lutely non-thinking substance, or how can motion pass 

 into thought ? And the pre-established harmony is, in 

 Wolff's view, preferable to Occasionalism merely because 

 it means one large and comprehensive initial miracle 

 rather than an endless series of miraculous interventions 

 of God. 



The natural, physical world is thus, according to Wolff, 

 entirely subject to mechanical laws. There is, indeed, a 

 realm of final causes, but the ends of things are com- 

 pletely external to the things themselves. The final cause 

 of a physical substance is not, as in the view of Leibniz, 

 to be found in the nature of the substance itself, in its 

 tendency towards self-realization, but in a law imposed 

 upon it from outside. Thus the Wolffian teleology 

 becomes almost childish, and suggests at times the naive 

 explanations of things which are to be found in such 

 writers as Bernardin de St. Pierre, who tells us that the 

 melon is made large in comparison with other fruits to 

 indicate that it ought to be eaten not in solitude but en 

 famille, and that the cow with only one calf has four teats 

 because the human race is fond of milk. Wolff hardly 

 rises to this height, but he regards the stars as existing to 

 give us light at night, and he points out that ' the light 

 of day is of great advantage to us ; it enables us to carry 

 on comfortably certain works which comparative darkness 

 would make impossible or difficult, and also more expen- 



1 Here again Wolff's position is glaringly ineon'sistent. His 

 physical atoms or Monads are supposed to have a unity like that 

 of the Leibnitian Monads. Yet he denies to them that which, for 

 Leibniz, is the principle of this unity, viz. a soul differing not in 

 kind but in degree from the conscious and rational soul. The atomi 

 naturae are, in short, neither atoms nor Monads, but a contradictory 

 jumble of the characteristics of both. Wolff regards the atomi 

 naturae as 'in themselves indivisible,' and thus distinguishes them 

 from atomi materiales, which are l in themselves divisible,' but which 

 cannot be actually divided by any natural power. See Cosmologia, 

 182 sqq., 186 sqq. and 232. 



