198 INTRODUCTION 



While the academic writers on philosophy missed much 

 of his best thought, its spirit was felt in the literature of 

 Germany through the works of Lessing and Herder 1 . 

 Nor was Leibniz's thinking altogether without effect upon 

 English literature ; for, though the doctrine is sadly 

 straitened into platitude, that sense of the varied whole- 

 ness and harmonious system of things which pervades the 

 Theodicee is cleverly expressed in the Essay on Man by 

 the phrases of which Pope was a master ". Again, with 

 regard to the influence of Leibniz upon natural science, 

 reference may be made to the way in which his idea that 

 the organism is a group of smaller organisms, has been in 

 various forms developed by naturalists like Buffon 3 , and 

 has finally gained something like scientific verification in 

 the cell-theory of Schwann. Johannes Muller recognized 

 this by giving to the cells the somewhat inappropriate 

 name of * organic monads V Modern psychology also, in 

 the attention it directs to 'sub-conscious' processes and 

 in its analysis of sensations and perceptions into elements 

 which are individually unnoticed (e. g. the * over-tones ' of 

 Helmholtz and the ' local signs ' of Lotze), owes much to 



1 See Merz's Leibniz (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), pp. 195 

 sqq. There are also traces of the influence of Leibniz in the works 

 of Schiller, who is said to have written his poem Die Freundschaft 

 when his mind was full of ideas suggested by the reading of 

 Leibniz. This is the poem from which Hegel in his Geschichte d. 

 Phil., vol. i. p. 91 (ed. 1840), quotes the well-known lines ' Freundlos 

 war der grosse Weltenmeister,' &c. The poem belongs to Schiller's 

 ' First Period.' 



8 See Introduction to the edition by Mark Pattison (Clarendon 

 Press). Bolingbroke said of Pope that he was a very great wit, 

 but a very indifferent philosopher.' 



3 Cf. Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, &c. (1787), vol. iv. p. 22 : 'Living 

 beings contain a large number of living and active molecules. 

 The life of the animal or of the plant appears to be only the result 

 of all the activities, of all the little individual lives (if I may so 

 speak) of each of these active molecules, whose life is underived 

 [primitive] and appears incapable of destruction.' 



4 Weismann regards the unicellular organism as immortal. Cf. 

 Essays upon Heredity, &c. (Eng. ed. by Poulton, SchOnland, and 

 Shipley, pp. 25 and 27). For a good account of the relation of 

 Leibniz's philosophy to modern scientific thought, see Watson, 

 Comte, Mill and Spencer, pp. 126 sqq. 



