In discussing the representation in which the being and activity of the monads consist, we must not think directly of the conscious activity of the human soul. Representation has in Leibnitz a wider meaning than that usually associated with the word. The distinction, which has become of the first importance for psychology, between mere representation and conscious representation, or between perception and apperception, may be best explained by the example of the sound of the waves. The roar which we perceive in the vicinity of the sea-beach is composed of the numerous sounds of the single waves. Each single sound is of itself too small to be heard; nevertheless it must make an impression on us, if only a small one, since otherwise their total—as a sum of mere nothings—could not be heard. The sensation which the motion of the single wave causes is a weak, confused, unconscious, infinitesimal perception (petite, insensible perception), which must be combined with many similar minute sensations in order to become strong and distinct, or to rise above the threshold of consciousness. The sound of the single wave is felt, but not distinguished, is perceived, but not apperceived. These obscure states of unconscious representation, which are present in the mind of man along with states of clear consciousness, make up, in the lowest grade of existence, the whole life of the monad. There are beings which never rise above the condition of deep sleep or stupor.

In conformity with this more inclusive meaning, perception is defined as the representation of the external in the internal, of multiplicity in unity (representatio multitudinis in unitate). The representing being, without prejudice to its simplicity, bears in itself a multitude of relations to external things. What now is the manifold, which is expressed, perceived, or represented, in the unit, the monad? It is the whole world. Every monad represents all others in itself, is a concentrated all, the universe in miniature. Each individual contains an infinity in itself (substantia infinitas actiones simul exercet) and a supreme intelligence, for which every obscure idea would at once become distinct, would be able to read in a single monad the whole universe and its history—all that is, has been, or will be; for the past has left its traces behind it, and the future will bring nothing not founded in the present: the monad is freighted with the past and bears the future in its bosom. Every monad is thus a mirror of the universe,[1] but a living mirror (miror vivant de l'univers), which generates the images of things by its own activity or develops them from inner germs, without experiencing influences from without. The monad has no windows through which anything could pass in or out, but in its action is dependent only on God and on itself.

[Footnote 1: The objection has been made against Leibnitz, and not without reason, that strictly speaking there is no content for the representation of the monads, although he appears to offer them the richest of all contents, the whole world. The "All" which he makes them represent is itself nothing but a sum of beings, also representative. The objects of representation are merely representing subjects; the monad A represents the monads from B to Z, while these in turn do nothing more than represent one another. The monad mirrors mirrors—where is the thing that is mirrored? The essence of substance consists in being related to others, which themselves are only points of relation; amid mere relativities we never reach a real. That which prevented Leibnitz himself from recognizing this empty formalism was, no doubt, the fact that for him the mere form of representation was at once filled with a manifold experiential content, with the whole wealth of spiritual life, and that the quantitative differences in representation, which for him meant also degrees of feeling, desire, action, and progress, imperceptibly took on the qualitative vividness of individual characteristics. Moreover, it must not be overlooked that the spiritual beings represent not merely the universe but the Deity as well, hence a very rich object.]

All monads represent the same universe, but each one represents it differently, that is, from its particular point of view—represents that which is near at hand distinctly, and that which is distant confusedly. Since they all reflect the same content or object, their difference consists only in the energy or degree of clearness in their representations. So far then, as their action consists in representation, distinct representation evidently coincides with complete, unhindered activity, confused representation with arrested activity, or passivity. The clearer the representations of a monad the more active it is. To have clear and distinct perceptions only is the prerogative of God; to the Omnipresent everything is alike near. He alone is pure activity; all finite beings are passive as well, that is, so far as their perceptions are not clear and distinct. Retaining the Aristotelian-Scholastic terminology, Leibnitz calls the active principle form, the passive matter, and makes the monad, since it is not, like God, purus actus and pure form, consist of form (entelechy, soul) and matter. This matter, as a constituent of the monad, does not mean corporeality, but only the ground for the arrest of its activity. The materia prima (the principle of passivity in the monad) is the ground, the materia secunda (the phenomenon of corporeal mass) the result of the indistinctness of the representations. For a group of monads appears as a body when it is indistinctly perceived. Whoever deprives the monad of activity falls into the error of Spinoza; whoever takes away its passivity or matter falls into the opposite error, for he deifies individual beings.

No monad represents the common universe and its individual parts just as well as the others, but either better or worse. There are as many different degrees of clearness and distinctness as there are monads.

Nevertheless certain classes may be distinguished. By distinguishing between clear and obscure perceptions, and in the former class between distinct and confused ones—a perception is clear when it is sufficiently distinguished from others, distinct when its component parts are thus distinguished—Leibnitz reaches three principal grades. Lowest stand the simple or naked monads, which never rise above obscure and unconscious perception and, so to speak, pass their lives in a swoon or sleep. If perception rises into conscious feeling, accompanied by memory, then the monad deserves the name of soul. And if the soul rises to self-consciousness and to reason or the knowledge of universal truth, it is called spirit. Each higher stage comprehends the lower, since even in spirits many perceptions remain obscure and confused. Hence it was an error when the Cartesians made thought or conscious activity—by which, it is true, the spirit is differentiated from the lower beings—to such a degree the essence of spirit that they believed it necessary to deny to it all unconscious perceptions.

From perception arises appetition, not as independent activity, but as a modification of perception; it is nothing but the tendency to pass from one perception to another (l'appetit est la tendance d'une perception a une autre); impulse is perception in process of becoming. Where the perceptions are conscious and rational appetition rises into will. All monads are self-active or act spontaneously, but only the thinking ones are free. Freedom is the spontaneity of spirits. Freedom does not consist in undetermined choice, but in action without external compulsion according to the laws of one's own being. The monad develops its representations out of itself, from the germs which form its nature. The correspondence of the different pictures of the world, however, is grounded in a divine arrangement, through which the natures of the monads have from the beginning been so adapted to one another that the changes in their states, although they take place in each according to immanent laws and without external influence, follow an exactly parallel course, and the result is the same as though there were a constant mutual interaction. This general idea of a pre-established harmony finds special application in the problem of the interaction between body and soul. Body and soul are like two clocks so excellently constructed that, without needing to be regulated by each other, they show exactly the same time. Over the numberless lesser miracles with which occasionalism burdened the Deity, the one great miracle of the pre-established harmony has an undeniable advantage. As one great miracle it is more worthy of the divine wisdom than the many lesser ones, nay, it is really no miracle at all, since the harmony does not interfere with natural laws, but yields them. This idea may even be freed from its theological investiture and reduced to the purely metaphysical expression, that the natures of the monads, by which the succession of their representations is determined in conformity with law, consist in nothing else than the sum of relations in which this individual thing stands to all other parts of the world, wherein each member takes account of all others and at the same time is considered by them, and thus exerts influence as well as suffers it. In this way the external idea of an artificial adaptation is avoided. The essence of each thing is simply the position which it occupies in the organic whole of the universe; each member is related to every other and shares actively and passively in the life of all the rest. The history of the universe is a single great process in numberless reflections.

The metaphysics of Leibnitz begins with the concept of representation and ends with the harmony of the universe. The representations were multiplicity (the endless plurality of the represented) in unity (the unity of the representing monad); the harmony is unity (order, congruity of the world-image) in multiplicity (the infinitely manifold degrees of clearness in the representations). All monads represent the same universe; each one mirrors it differently. The unity, as well as the difference, could not be greater than it is; every possible degree of distinctness of representation is present in each single monad, and yet there is a single harmonic accord in which the unnumbered tones unite. Now order amid diversity, unity in variety make up the concept of beauty and perfection. If, then, this world shows, as it does, the greatest unity in the greatest multiplicity, so that there is nothing wanting and nothing superfluous, it is the most perfect, the best of all possible worlds. Even the lowest grades contribute to the perfection of the whole; their disappearance would mean a hiatus; and if the unclear and confused representations appear imperfect when considered in themselves, yet they are not so in reference to the whole; for just on this fact, that the monad is arrested in its representation or is passive, i.e., conforms itself to the others and subordinates itself to them, rest the order and connection of the world. Thus the idea of harmony forms the bridge between the Monadology and optimism.

As in regard to the harmony of the universe we found it possible to distinguish between a half-mythical, narrative form of presentation and a purely abstract conception, so we may make a similar distinction in the doctrine of creation. This actual world has been chosen by God as the best among many other conceivable worlds. Through the will of God the monads of which the world consists attained their reality; as possibilities or ideas they were present in the mind of God (as it were, prior to their actualization), present, too, with all the distinctive properties and perfections that they now exhibit in a state of realization, so that their merely possible or conceivable being had the same content as their actual being, and their essence is not altered or increased by their existence. Now, since the impulse toward actualization dwells in every possible essence, and is the more justifiable the more perfect the essence, a competition goes on before God, in which, first, those monod-possibilities unite which are mutually compatible or compossible, and, then, among the different conceivable combinations of monads or worlds that one is ordained for entrance into existence which shows the greatest possible sum of perfection. It was, therefore, not the perfection of the single monad, but the perfection of the system of which it forms a necessary part, that was decisive as to its admission into existence. The best world was known through God's wisdom, chosen through his goodness, and realized through his power.[1] The choice was by no means arbitrary, but wholly determined by the law of fitness or of the best (principe du meilleur); God's will must realize that which his understanding recognizes as most perfect. It is at once evident that in the competition of the possible worlds the victory of the best was assured by the lex melioris, apart from the divine decision.

[Footnote 1: In regard to the dependence of the world on God, there is a certain conflict noticeable in Leibnitz between the metaphysical interests involved in the substantiality of individual beings, together with the moral interests involved in guarding against fatalism, and the opposing interests of religion. On the one side, creation is for him only an actualization of finished, unchangeable possibilities, on the other, he teaches with the mediaeval philosophers that this was not accomplished by a single act of realization, that the world has need of conservation, i.e., of continuous creation.]

This law is the special expression of a more general one, the principle of sufficient reason, which Leibnitz added, as of equal authority, to the Aristotelian laws of thought. Things or events are real (and assertions true) when there is a sufficient reason for their existence, and for their determinate existence. The principium rationis sufficientis governs our empirical knowledge of contingent truths or truths of fact, while, on the other hand, the pure rational knowledge of necessary or eternal (mathematical and metaphysical) truths rests on the principium contradictionis. The principle of contradiction asserts, that is, whatever contains a contradiction is false or impossible; whatever contains no contradiction is possible; that whose opposite contains a contradiction is necessary. Or positively formulated as the principle of identity, everything and every representative content is identical with itself.[2] Upon this antithesis between the rational laws of contradiction and sufficient reason—which, however, is such only for us men, while the divine spirit, which cognizes all things a priori, is able to reduce even the truths of fact to the eternal truths—Leibnitz bases his distinction between two kinds of necessity. That is metaphysically necessary whose opposite involves a contradiction; that is morally necessary or contingent which, on account of its fitness, is preferred by God to its (equally conceivable) opposite. To the latter class belongs, further, the physically necessary: the necessity of the laws of nature is only a conditional necessity (conditioned by the choice of the best); they are contingent truths or truths of fact. The principle of sufficient reason holds for efficient as well as for final causes, and between the two realms there is, according to Leibnitz, the most complete correspondence. In the material world every particular must be explained in a purely mechanical way, but the totality of the laws of nature, the universal mechanism itself, cannot in turn be mechanically explained, but only on the basis of finality, so that the mechanical point of view is comprehended in, and subordinated to, the teleological. Thus it becomes clear how Leibnitz in the ratio sufficiens has final causes chiefly in mind.

[Footnote 2: Within the knowledge of reason, as well as in experiential knowledge, a further distinction is made between primary truths (which need no proof) and derived truths. The highest truths of reason are the identical principles, which are self-evident; from these intuitive truths all others are to be derived by demonstration—proof is analysis and, as free from contradictions, demonstration. The primitive truths of experience are the immediate facts of consciousness; whatever is inferred from them is less certain than demonstrative knowledge. Nevertheless experience is not to be estimated at a low value; it is through it alone that we can assure ourselves of the reality of the objects of thought, while necessary truths guarantee only that a predicate must be ascribed to a subject (e.g., a circle), but make no deliverance as to whether this subject exists or not.]

To the broad and comprehensive tendency which is characteristic of Leibnitz's thinking, philosophy owes a further series of general laws, which all stand in the closest relation to one another and to his monadological and harmonistic principles, viz., the law of continuity, the law of analogy, the law of the universal dissimilarity of things or of the identity of indiscernibles, and, finally, the law of the conservation of force.

The most fundamental of these laws is the lex continui. On the one hand, it forbids every leap, on the other, all repetition in the series of beings and the series of events. Member must follow member without a break and without superfluous duplication; in the scale of creatures, as in the course of events, absolute continuity is the rule. Just as in the monad one state continually develops from another, the present one giving birth to the future, as it has itself grown out of the past, just as nothing persists, as nothing makes its entrance suddenly or without the way being prepared for it, and as all extremes are bound together by connecting links and gradual transitions,—so the monad itself stands in a continuous gradation of beings, each of which is related to and different from each. Since the beings and events form a single uninterrupted series, there are no distinctions of kind in the world, but only distinctions in degree. Rest and motion are not opposites, for rest may be considered as infinitely minute motion; the ellipse and the parabola are not qualitatively different, for the laws which hold for the one may be applied to the other. Likeness is vanishing unlikeness, passivity arrested activity, evil a lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals men with infinitely little reason, plants animals with vanishing consciousness, fluidity a lower degree of solidity, etc. In the whole world similarity and correspondence rule, and it is everywhere the same as here—between apparent opposites there is a distinction in degree merely, and hence, analogy. In the macrocosm of the universe things go on as in the microcosm of the monad; every later state of the world is prefigured in the earlier, etc. If, on the one side, the law of analogy follows as a consequence from the law of continuity, on the other, we have the principium (identitatis) indiscernibilium. As nature abhors gaps, so also it avoids the superfluous. Every grade in the series must be represented, but none more than once. There are no two things, no two events which are entirely alike. If they were exactly alike they would not be two, but one. The distinction between them is never merely numerical, nor merely local and temporal, but always an intrinsic difference: each thing is distinguished from every other by its peculiar nature. This law holds both for the truly real (the monads) and for the phenomenal world—you will never find two leaves exactly alike. By the law of the conservation of force, Leibnitz corrects the Cartesian doctrine of the conservation of motion, and approaches the point of view of the present day. According to Descartes it is the sum of actual motions, which remains constant; according to Leibnitz, the sum of the active forces; while, according to the modern theory, it is the sum of the active and the latent or potential forces—a distinction, moreover, of which Leibnitz himself made use.

We now turn from the formal framework of general laws, to the actual, to that which, obeying these laws, constitutes the living content of the world.

%2. The Organic World.%

A living being is a machine composed of an infinite number of organs. The natural machines formed by God differ from the artificial machines made by the hand of man, in that, down to their smallest parts, they consist of machines. Organisms are complexes of monads, of which one, the soul, is supreme, while the rest, which serve it, form its body. The dominant monad is distinguished from those which surround it as its body by the greater distinctness of its ideas. The supremacy of the soul-monad consists in this one superior quality, that it is more active and more perfect, and clearly reflects that which the body-monads represent but obscurely. A direct interaction between soul and body does not take place; there is only a complete correspondence, instituted by God. He foresaw that the soul at such and such a moment would have the sensation of warmth, or would wish an arm-motion executed, and has so ordered the development of the body-monads that, at the same instant, they appear to cause this sensation and to obey this impulse to move. Now, since God in this foreknowledge and accommodation naturally paid more regard to the perfect beings, to the more active and more distinctly perceiving monads than to the less perfect ones, and subordinated the latter, as means and conditions, to the former as ends, the soul, prior to creation, actually exercised an ideal influence—through the mind of God—upon its body. Its activity is the reason why in less perfect monads a definite change, a passion takes place, since the action was attainable only in this way, "compossible" with this alone.[1] The monads which constitute the body are the first and direct object of the soul; it perceives them more distinctly than it perceives, through them, the rest of the external world. In view of the close connection of the elements of the organism thus postulated, Leibnitz, in the discussions with Father Des Bosses concerning the compatibility of the Monadology with the doctrine of the Church, especially with the real presence of the body of Christ in the Supper, consented, in favor of the dogma, to depart from the assumption that the simple alone could be substantial and to admit the possibility of composite substances, and of a "substantial bond" connecting the parts of living beings. It appears least in contradiction with the other principles of the philosopher to assign the role of this vinculum substantiate to the soul or central monad itself.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Gustav Class, Die metaphysischen Voraussetzungen des Leibnizischen Determinismus, Tuebingen, 1874.]

Everything in nature is organized; there are no soulless bodies, no dead matter. The smallest particle of dust is peopled with a multitude of living beings and the tiniest drop of water swarms with organisms: every portion of matter may be compared to a pond filled with fish or a garden full of plants. This denial of the inorganic does not release our philosopher from the duty of explaining its apparent existence. If we thoughtfully consider bodies, we perceive that there is nothing lifeless and non-representative. But the phenomenon of extended mass arises for our confused sensuous perception, which perceives the monads composing a body together and regards them as a continuous unity. Body exists only as a confused idea in the feeling subject; since, nevertheless, a reality without the mind, namely, an immaterial monad-aggregate, corresponds to it, the phenomenon of body is a well-founded one (phenomenon bene fundatum). As matter is merely something present in sensation or confused representation, so space and time are also nothing real, neither substances nor properties, but only ideal things—the former the order of coexistences, the latter the order of successions.

If there are no soulless bodies, there are also no bodiless souls; the soul is always joined with an aggregate of subordinate monads, though not always with the same ones. Single monads are constantly passing into its body, or into its service, while others are passing out; it is involved in a continuous process of bodily transformation. Usually the change goes on slowly and with a constant replacement of the parts thrown off. If it takes place quickly men call it birth or death. Actual death there is as little as there is an actual genesis; not the soul only, but every living thing is imperishable. Death is decrease and involution, birth increase and evolution. The dying creature loses only a portion of its bodily machine and so returns to the slumberous or germinal condition of "involution", in which it existed before birth, and from which it was aroused through conception to development. Pre-existence as well as post-existence must be conceded both to animals and to men. Leuwenhoek's discovery of the spermatozoa furnished a welcome confirmation for this doctrine, that all individuals have existed since the beginning of the world, at least as preformed germs. The immortality of man, conformably to his superior dignity, differs from the continued existence of all monads, in that after his death he retains memory and the consciousness of his moral personality.

%3. Man: Cognition and Volition.%

In reason man possesses reflection or self-consciousness as well as the knowledge of God, of the universal, and of the eternal truths or a priori knowledge, while the animal is limited in its perception to experience, and in its reasoning to the connection of perceptions in accordance with memory. Man differs from higher beings in that the majority of his ideas are confused. Under confused ideas Leibnitz includes both sense-perceptions—anyone who has distinct ideas alone, as God, has no sense-perceptions—and the feelings which mediate between the former and the perfectly distinct ideas of rational thought. The delight of music depends, in his opinion, on an unconscious numbering and measuring of the harmonic and rhythmic relations of tones, aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful in general, and even sensuous pleasure, on the confused perception of a perfection, order, or harmony.

The application of the lex continui to the inner life has a very wide range. The principal results are: (1) the mind always thinks; (2) every present idea postulates a previous one from which it has arisen; (3) sensation and thought differ only in degree; (4) in the order of time, the ideas of sense precede those of reason. We are never wholly without ideas, only we are often not conscious of them. If thought ceased in deep sleep, we could have no ideas on awakening, since every representation proceeds from a preceding one, even though it be unconscious.

In the thoughtful New Essays concerning the Human Understanding Leibnitz develops his theory of knowledge in the form of a polemical commentary to Locke's chief work.[1] According to Descartes some ideas (the pure concepts) are innate, according to Locke none, according to Leibnitz all. Or: according to Descartes some ideas (sensuous perceptions) come from without, according to Locke all do so, according to Leibnitz none. Leibnitz agrees with Descartes against Locke in the position that the mind originally possesses ideas; he agrees with Locke against Descartes, that thought is later than sensation and the knowledge of universals later than that of particulars. The originality which Leibnitz attributes to intellectual ideas is different from that which Descartes had ascribed and Locke denied to them. They are original in that they do not come into the soul and are not impressed upon it from without; they are not original in that they can develop only from previously given sense-ideas; again, they are original in that they can be developed from confused ideas only because they are contained in them implicite or as pre-dispositions. Thus Leibnitz is able to agree with both his predecessors up to a certain point: with the one, that the pure concepts have their origin within the mind; with the other, that they are not the earliest knowledge, but are conditioned by sensations. This synthesis, however, was possible only because Leibnitz looked on sensation differently from both the others. If sensation is to be the mother of thought, and the latter at the same time to preserve its character as original, i.e., as something not obtained from without, sensation must, first, include an unconscious thinking in itself, and, secondly, must itself receive a title to originality and spontaneity. As the Catholic dogma added the immaculate conception of the mother to that of the Son, so Leibnitz transfers the (virginal) origin of rational concepts, independent of external influence, to sensations. The monad has no windows. It bears germinally in itself all that it is to experience, and nothing is impressed on it from without. The intellect should not be compared to a blank tablet, but to a block of marble in whose veins the outlines of the statue are prefigured. Ideas can only arise from ideas, never from external impressions or movements of corporeal parts. Thus all ideas are innate in the sense that they grow from inner germs; we possess them from the beginning, not developed (explicite), but potentially, that is, we have the capacity to produce them. The old Scholastic principle that "there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in sense" is entirely correct, only one must add, except the understanding itself, that is, the faculty of developing our knowledge out of ourselves. Thought lies already dormant in perception. With the mechanical position (sensuous representation precedes and conditions rational thought) is joined the teleological position (sensuous representations exist, in order to render the origin of thoughts possible), and with this purposive determination, sensation attains a higher dignity: it is more than has been seen in it before, for it includes in itself the future concept of the understanding in an unconscious form, nay, it is itself an imperfect thought, a thought in process of becoming. Sensation and thought are not different in kind, and if the former is called a passive state, still passivity is nothing other than diminished activity. Both are spontaneous; thought is merely spontaneous in a higher degree.

[Footnote 1: A careful comparison of Locke's theory of knowledge with that of Leibnitz is given by G. Hartenstein, Abhandlungen der k. saechs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Leipsic, 1865, included in Hartenstein's Historisch-philosophische Abhandlungen, 1870.]

By making sensation and feeling the preliminary step to thought, Leibnitz became the founder of that intellectualism which, in the system of Hegel, extended itself far beyond the psychological into the cosmical field, and endeavored to conceive not only all psychical phenomena but all reality whatsoever as a development of the Idea toward itself. This conception, which may be characterized as intellectualistic in its content, presents itself on its formal side as a quantitative way of looking at the world, which sacrifices all qualitative antitheses in order to arrange the totality of being and becoming in a single series with no distinctions but those of degree. If Leibnitz here appears as the representative of a view of the world which found in Kant a powerful and victorious opponent, yet, on the other hand, he prepared the way by his conception of innate ideas for the Critique of Reason. By his theory of knowledge he forms the transition link between Descartes and Kant, since he interprets necessary truths not as dwelling in the mind complete and explicit from the start, but as produced or raised into consciousness only on the occasion of sensuous experience. It must be admitted, moreover, that this in reality was only a restoration of Descartes's original position, i.e., a deliverance of it from the misinterpretations and perversions which it had suffered at the hands of adherents and opponents alike, but which Descartes, it is true, had failed to render impossible from the start by conclusive explanations. The author of the theory of innate ideas certainly did not mean what Locke foists upon him, that the child in the cradle already possesses the ideas of God, of thought, and of extension in full clearness. But whether Leibnitz improved or only restored Descartes, it was in any case an important advance when experience and thought were brought into more definite relation, and the productive force in rational concepts was secured to the latter and the occasion of their production to the former.

The unconscious or minute ideas, which in noetics had served to break the force of Locke's objections against the innateness of the principles of reason, are in ethics brought into the field against indeterminism. They are involved whenever we believe ourselves to act without cause, from pure choice, or contrary to the motives present. In this last case, a motive which is very strong in itself is overcome by the united power of many in themselves weaken The will is always determined, and that by an idea (of ends), which generally is of a very complex nature, and in which the stronger side decides the issue. An absolute equilibrium of motives is impossible: the world cannot be divided into two entirely similar parts (this in opposition to "Buridan's ass"). A spirit capable of looking us through and through would be able to calculate all our volitions and actions beforehand.

In spite of this admitted inevitableness of our resolutions and actions, the predicate of freedom really belongs to them, and this on two grounds. First, they are only physically or morally, not metaphysically, necessary; as a matter of fact, it is true, they cannot happen otherwise, but their opposite involves no logical contradiction and remains conceivable. To express this thought the formula, often repeated since, that our motives only impel, incite, or stimulate the will, but do not compel it (inclinant, non necessitant), was chosen, but not very happily. Secondly, the determination of the will is an inner necessitation, grounded in the being's own nature, not an external compulsion. The agent determines himself in accordance with his own nature, and for this each bears the responsibility himself, for God, when he brought the monads out of possibility into actuality, left their natures as they had existed before the creation in the form of eternal ideas in His understanding. Though Leibnitz thus draws a distinction between his deterministic doctrine and the "fatalism" of Spinoza, he recognizes a second concept of freedom, which completely corresponds to Spinoza's. A decision is the more free the more distinct the ideas which determine it, and a man the more free the more he withdraws his will from the influence of the passions, i.e., confused ideas, and subordinates it to that of reason. God alone is absolutely free, because he has no ideas which are not distinct. The bridge between the two conceptions of freedom is established by the principle that reason constitutes the peculiar nature of man in a higher degree than the sum of his ideas; for it is reason which distinguishes him from the lower beings. According to the first meaning of freedom man is free, according to the second, which coincides with activity, perfection, and morality, he should become free.

Morality is the result of the natural development of the individual. Every being strives after perfection or increased activity, i.e., after more distinct ideas. Parallel to this theoretical advance runs a practical advance in a twofold form: the increasing distinctness of ideas, or enlightenment, or wisdom, raises the impulse to transitory, sensuous pleasure into an impulse to permanent delight in our spiritual perfection, or toward happiness, while, further, it opens up an insight into the connection of all beings and the harmony of the world, in virtue of which the virtuous man will seek to promote the perfection and happiness of others as well as his own, i.e., will love them, for to love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. To promote the good of all, again, is the same as to contribute one's share to the world-harmony and to co-operate in the fulfillment of God's purposes. Probity and piety are the same. They form the highest of the three grades of natural right, which Leibnitz distinguishes as jus strictum (mere right, with the principle: Injure no one), aequitas (equity or charity, with the maxim: To each his due), and probitas sive pietas (honorableness joined with religion, according to the command: Lead an upright and morally pure life). They may also be designated as commutative, distributive, and universal justice. Belief in God and immortality is a condition of the last.

%4. Theology and Theodicy.%

God is the ground and the end of the world. All beings strive toward him, as all came out from him. In man the general striving toward the most perfect Being rises into conscious love to God, which is conditioned by the knowledge of God and produces virtuous action as its effect. Enlightenment and virtue are the essential constituents of religion; all else, as cultus and dogma, have only a derivative value. Religious ceremonies are an imperfect expression of the practical element in piety, as the doctrines of faith are a weak imitation of the theoretical. It is a direct contradiction of the intention of the Divine Teacher when occult formulas and ceremonies, which have no connection with virtue, are made the chief thing. The points in which the creeds agree are more important than those by which they are differentiated. Natural religion has found its most perfect expression in Christianity, although paganism and Judaism had also grasped portions of the truth. Salvation is not denied to the heathen, for moral purity is sufficient to make one a partaker of the grace of God. The religion of the Jews elevated monotheism, which, it is true, made its appearance among the heathen in isolated philosophers, but was never the popular religion, into a law; but it lacked the belief in immortality. Christianity made the religion of the sage the religion of the people.

Whatever of positive doctrine revelation has added to natural religion transcends the reason, it is true, but does not contradict it. It contains no principles contrary to reason (whose opposite can be proved), but, no doubt, principles above reason, i.e., such as the reason could not have found without help from without, and which it cannot fully comprehend, though it is able approximately to understand them and to defend them against objections. Hence Leibnitz defended the Trinity, which he interpreted as God's power, understanding, and will, the eternity of the torments of hell (which brought him the commendation of Lessing), and other dogmas. Miracles also belong among the things the how and why of which we are not in a position to comprehend, but only the that and what. Since the laws of nature are only physically or conditionally necessary, i.e. have been enacted only because of their fitness for the purposes of God, they may be suspended in special cases when a higher end requires it.

While the positive doctrines of faith cannot be proved—as, on the other hand, they cannot be refuted—the principles of natural religion admit of strict demonstration. The usual arguments for the existence of God are useful, but need amendment. The ontological argument of Descartes, that from the concept of a most perfect Being his existence follows, is correct so soon as the idea of God is shown to be possible or free from contradiction. The cosmological proof runs: Contingent beings point to a necessary, self-existent Being, the eternal truths especially presuppose an eternal intelligence in which they exist. If we ask why anything whatever, or why just this world exists, this ultimate ground of things cannot be found within the world. Every contingent thing or event has its cause in another. However far we follow out the series of conditions, we never reach an ultimate, unconditioned cause. Consequently the sufficient reason for the series must be situated without the world, and, as is evident from the harmony of things, can only be an infinitely wise and good Being. Here the teleological proof comes in: From the finality of the world we reason to the existence of a Being, as the author of the world, who works in view of ends and who wills and carries out that which is best,—to the supreme intelligence, goodness, and power of the Creator. A special inferential value accrues to this position from the system of pre-established harmony—it is manifest that the complete correspondence of the manifold substances in the world, which are not connected with one another by any direct interaction, can proceed only from a common cause endowed with infinite intelligence and power.

The possibility of proving the existence of one omnipotent and all-beneficent God, and the impossibility of refuting the positive dogmas, save the harmony of faith and reason, which Bayle had denied. The conclusion of the New Essays and the opening of the Theodicy are devoted to this theme. The second part gives, also against Bayle, the justification of God in view of the evil in the world. Si Deus est, unde malum? Optimism has to reckon with the facts of experience, and to show that this world, in spite of its undeniable imperfections, is still the best world. God could certainly have brought into actuality a world in which there would have been less imperfection than in ours, but it would at the same time have contained fewer perfections. No world whatever can exist entirely free from evil, entirely without limitation—whoever forbids God to create imperfect beings forbids him to create a world at all. Certain evils—in general terms, the evil of finitude—are entirely inseparable from the concept of created beings; imperfection attaches to every created thing as such. Other evils God has permitted because it was only through them that certain higher goods, which ought not to be renounced, could be brought to pass. Think of the lofty feelings, noble resolves, and great deeds which war occasions, think of national enthusiasm, readiness for sacrifice, and defiance of death—all these would be given over, if war should be taken out of the world on account of the suffering which it also brings in its train.

If we turn from the general principles to their application in detail, we find a separate proof for the inevitableness or salutary nature of each of the three kinds of evil—the metaphysical evil of created existence, the physical evil of suffering (and punishment), and the moral evil of sin. Metaphysical evil is absolutely unavoidable, if a world is to exist at all; created beings without imperfection, finiteness, limitation, are entirely inconceivable—something besides gods must exist. The physical evil of misery finds its justification in that it makes for good. First of all, the amount of suffering is not so great as it appears to discontented spirits to be. Life is usually quite tolerable, and vouchsafes more joy and pleasure than grief and hardship; in balancing the good and the evil we must especially remember to reckon on the positive side the goods of activity, of health, and all that which affords us, perchance, no perceptible pleasure, but the removal of which would be felt as an evil (Theodicy, ii. Sec. 251). Most evils serve to secure us a much greater good, or to ward off a still greater evil. Would a brave general, if given the choice of leaving the battle unwounded, but also without the victory, or of winning the victory at the cost of a wound, hesitate an instant to choose the latter? Other troubles, again, must be regarded as punishment for sins and as means of reformation; the man who is resigned to God's will may be certain that the sufferings which come to him will turn out for his good.

Especially if we consider the world as a whole, it is evident that the sum of evil vanishes before the sum of good. It is wrong to look upon the happiness of man as the end of the world. Certainly God had the happiness of rational beings in mind, but not this exclusively, for they form only a part of the world, even if it be the highest part. God's purpose has reference rather to the perfection of the whole system of the universe. Now the harmony of the universe requires that all possible grades of reality be represented, that there should be indistinct ideas, sense, and corporeality, not merely a realm of spirits, and with these, conditions of imperfection, feelings of pain, and theoretical and moral errors are inevitably given. The connection and the order of the world demands a material element in the monad, but happiness without alloy can never be the lot of a spirit joined to a body. Thirdly, in regard to moral evil also we receive the assurance that the sum of the bad is much less than that of the good. Then, moral evil is connected with metaphysical evil: created beings cannot be absolutely perfect, hence, also, not morally perfect or sinless. But, in return for this, there is no being that is absolutely imperfect, none only and entirely evil. With this is joined the well-known principle of the earlier thinkers, that evil is nothing actual, but merely deprivation, absence of good, lack of clear reason and force of will. That which is real in the evil action, the power to act, is perfect and good, and, as force, comes from God—the negative or evil element in it comes from the agent himself; just as in the case of two ships of the same size, but unequally laden, which drift with the current, the speed comes from the stream and the retardation from the load of the vessels themselves. God is not responsible for sin, for he has only permitted it, not willed it directly, and man was already evil before he was created. The fact that God foresaw that man would sin does not constrain the latter to commit the evil deed, but this follows from his own (eternal) being, which God left unaltered when he granted him existence. The guilt and the responsibility fall wholly on the sinner himself. The permission of evil is explained by the predominantly good results which follow from it (not, as in physical evil, for the sufferer himself, but for others)—from the crime of Sextus Tarquinius sprang a great kingdom with great men (of. the beautiful myth in connection with a dialogue of Laurentius Valla, Theodicy, iii. 413-416). Finally, reference is made again to the contribution which evil makes to the perfection of the whole. Evil has the same function in the world as the discords in a piece of music, or the shadows in a painting—the beauty is heightened by the contrast. The good needs a foil in order to come out distinctly and to be felt in all its excellence.

In the Leibnitzian theodicy the least satisfactory part is the justification of moral evil. We miss the view defended in such grand outlines by Hegel, and so ingeniously by Fechner, that the good is not the flower of a quiet, unmolested development, but the fruit of energetic labor; that it has need of its opposite; that it not merely must approve itself in the battle against evil without and within the acting subject, but that it is only through this conflict that it is attainable at all. Virtue implies force of will as well as purity, and force develops only by resistance. Although he does not appreciate the full depth of the significance of pain, Leibnitz's view of suffering deserves more approval than his questionable application to the ethical sphere of the quantitative view of the world, with its interpretation of evil as merely undeveloped good. But, in any case, the compassionate contempt of the pessimism of the day for the "shallow" Leibnitz is most unjustifiable.



CHAPTER VIII.

THE GERMAN ILLUMINATION.

%1. The Contemporaries of Leibnitz.%

The period between Kepler and Leibnitz in Germany was very poor in noteworthy philosophical phenomena. The physicist, Christoph Sturm[1] of Altdorf (died 1703), was a follower of Descartes, Joachim Jungius[2] (died 1657) a follower of Bacon, though not denying with the latter the value of the mathematical method in natural science. Hieronymus Hirnhaym, Abbot at Prague (The Plague of the Human Race, or the Vanity of Human Learning, 1676), declared the thirst for knowledge of his age a dangerous disease, knowledge uncertain, since no reliance can be placed on sense-perception and the principles of thought contradict the doctrines of faith, and harmful, since it contributes nothing to salvation, but makes its possessors proud and draws them away from piety. He maintained, further, that divine authority is the only refuge for man, and moral life the true science. Side by side with such skepticism Hirnhaym's contemporary, the poet Angelus Silesius (Joh. Scheffler, died 1667), defended mysticism. The teacher of natural law, Samuel Pufendorf[3] (1632-94, professor in Heidelberg and Lund, died in Berlin), aimed to mediate between Grotius and Hobbes. Natural law is demonstrable, its real ground is the will of God, its noetical ground (not revelation, but) reason and observation of the (social) nature of man, and the fundamental law the promotion of universal good. The individual must not violate the interests of society in satisfying his impulse to self-preservation, because his own interests require social existence, and, consequently, respect for its conditions.

[Footnote 1: Chr. Sturm: Physica Conciliatrix, 1687; Physica Electiva, vol. i. 1697, vol. ii. with preface by Chr. Wolff, 1722; Compendium Universalium seu Metaphysica Euclidea.]

[Footnote 2: J. Jung Logica Hamburgiensis, 1638; cf. Guhrauer, 1859.]

[Footnote 3: Pufendorf: Elementa Juris Universalis, 1660; De Statu Imperii Germanici, 1667, under the pseudonym Monzambano; De Jure Natures et Gentium 1672, and an abstract of this, De Officio Hominis et Civis, 1673.]

Pufendorf was followed by Christian Thomasius[1] (1655-1728; professor of law at the University of Halle from its foundation in 1694). He was the first instructor who ventured to deliver lectures in the German language—in Leipsic from 1687—and at the same time was the editor of the first learned journal in German (Teutsche Monate, Geschichte der Weisheit und Thorheit). In Thomasius the characteristic features of the German Illumination first came out in full distinctness, namely, the avoidance of scholasticism in expression and argument, the direct relation of knowledge to life, sober rationality in thinking, heedless eclecticism, and the demand for religious tolerance. Philosophy must be generally intelligible, and practically useful, knowledge of the world (not of God); its form, free and tasteful ratiocination; its object, man and morals; its first duty, culture, not learning; its highest aim, happiness; its organ and the criterion of every truth, common sense. He alone gains true knowledge who frees his understanding from prejudice and judges only after examining for himself; the joy of mental peace is given to no one who does not free his heart from foolish desires and vehement passions, and devote it to virtue, to "rational love." The positive doctrines of Thomasius have less interest than this general standpoint, which prefigured the succeeding period. He divides practical philosophy into natural law which treats of the justum, politics which treats of the decorum, and ethics which treats of the honestum. Justice bids us, Do not to others what you would not that others should do to you; decorum, Do to others as you would that they should do to you; and morality, Do to yourself as you would that others should do to themselves. The first two laws relate to external, the third to internal, peace; legal duties may be enforced by compulsion, moral duties not.

[Footnote 1: Thomasius: Institutionum Jurisprudentiae Divinae Libri Tres, 1688; Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium, 1705, both in Latin; in German, appeared in 1691-96 the Introduction and Application of Rational and Moral Philosophy.]

If Thomasius was the leader of those popular philosophers who, unconcerned about systematic continuity, discussed every question separately before the tribunal of common sense, and found in their lack of allegiance to any philosophical sect a sufficient guarantee of the unprejudicedness and impartiality of their reflections, Count Walter von Tschirnhausen (1651-1708; Medecina Mentis sive Artis Inveniendi Praecepta Generalia, 1687), a friend of Spinoza and Leibnitz, became the prototype of another group of the philosophers of the Illumination. This group favored eclecticism of a more scientific kind, by starting from considerations of method and seeking to overcome the antithesis between rationalism and empiricism. While fully persuaded of the validity and necessity of the mathematical method in philosophical investigations, as well as elsewhere, Tschirnhausen still holds it indispensable that the deductions, on the one hand, start from empirical facts, and, on the other, that they be confirmed by experiments. Inner experience gives us four primal facts, of which the chief is the certainty of self-consciousness. The second, that many things affect us agreeably and many disagreeably, is the basis of morals; the third, that some things are comprehensible to us and others not, the basis of logic; the fourth, that through the senses we passively receive impressions from without, the basis of the empirical sciences, in particular, of physics. Consequently consciousness, will, understanding, and sensuous representation (imaginatio), together with corporeality, are our fundamental concepts. Not perception (perceptio), but conception (conceptio) alone gives science; that which we can "conceive" is true; the understanding as such cannot err, but undoubtedly the imagination can lead us to confuse the merely perceived with that which is conceived. The method of science is geometrical demonstration, which starts from (genetic) definitions, and from their analysis obtains axioms, from their combination, theorems. That which is thus proved a priori must, as already remarked, be confirmed a posteriori. The highest of all sciences is natural philosophy, since it considers not sense-objects only, not (like mathematics) the objects of reason only, but the actual itself in its true character. Hence it is the divine science, while the human sciences busy themselves only with our ideas or the relations of things to us.

%2. Christian Wolff.%

Christian Wolff was born at Breslau in 1679, studied theology at Jena, and in addition mathematics and philosophy, habilitated at Leipsic in 1703, and obtained, through the instrumentality of Leibnitz, a professorship of mathematics at Halle, in 1706. His lectures, which soon extended themselves over all philosophical disciplines, met with great success. This popularity, as well as the rationalistic tendency of his thinking, aroused the disfavor of the pietists, Francke and Lange, who succeeded, in 1723, in securing from King Frederick William I. his removal from his chair and his expulsion from the kingdom. Finding a refuge in Marburg, he was called back to Halle by Frederick the Great a short time after the latter's ascension of the throne. Here he taught and wrote zealously until his death in 1754. In his lectures, as well as in half of his writings,[1] he followed the example of Thomasius in using the German language, which he prepared in a most praiseworthy manner for the expression of philosophical ideas and furnished with a large part of the technical terms current to-day. Thus the terms Verhaeltniss (relation), Vorstellung (representation, idea), Bewusstsein (consciousness), stetig (continuus), come from Wolff, as well as the distinction between Kraft (power) and Vermoegen (faculty), and between Grund (ground) and Ursache (cause),[2] Another great service consisted in the reduction of the philosophy of Leibnitz to a systematic form, by which he secured a dissemination for it which otherwise it would scarcely have obtained. But he did not possess sufficient originality to contribute anything remarkable of his own, and it showed little self-knowledge when he became indignant at the designation Leibnitzio-Wolffian philosophy, which was first used by his pupil, Bilfinger. The alterations which he made in the doctrines of Leibnitz are far from being improvements, and the parts which he rejected are just the most characteristic and thoughtful of all. Such at least is the opinion of thinkers to-day, though this mutilation and leveling down of the most daring of Leibnitz's hypotheses was perhaps entirely advantageous for Wolff's impression on his contemporaries; what appeared questionable to him would no doubt have repelled them also. Leibnitz's two leading ideas, the theory of monads and the pre-established harmony, were most of all affected by this process of toning down. Wolff weakens the former by attributing a representative power only to actual souls, which are capable of consciousness, although he holds that bodies are compounded of simple beings and that the latter are endowed with (a not further defined) force. He limits the application of the pre-established harmony to the relation of body and soul, which to Leibnitz was only a case especially favorable for the illustration of the hypothesis. By such trifling the real meaning of both these ideas is sacrificed and their bloom rubbed off.—While depth is lacking in Wolff's thinking, he is remarkable for his power of systematization, his persevering diligence, and his logical earnestness, so that the praise bestowed on him by Kant, that he was the author of the spirit of thoroughness in Germany, was well deserved. He, too, finds the end of philosophy in the enlightenment of the understanding, the improvement of the heart, and, ultimately, in the promotion of the happiness of mankind. But while Thomasius demanded as a condition of such universal intelligibility and usefulness that, discarding the scholastic garb, philosophy should appear in the form of easy ratiocination, Wolff, on the other hand, regards methodical procedure and certainty in results as indispensable to its usefulness, and, in order to this certainty, insists on distinctness of conception and cogency of proof. He demands a philosophia et certa et utilis. If, finally, his methodical deliberateness, especially in his later works, leads him into wearisome diffuseness, this pedantry is made good by his genuinely German, honest spirit, which manifests itself agreeably in his judgment on practical questions.

[Footnote 1: Reasonable Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding, 1712; Reasonable Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, also on All Things in General, 1719 (Notes to this 1724); Reasonable Thoughts on the Conduct of Man, 1720; Reasonable Thoughts on the Social Life of Man, 1721; Reasonable Thoughts on the Operations of Nature, 1723; Reasonable Thoughts on the Purposes of Natural Things, 1724; Reasonable Thoughts on the Parts of Man, Animals, and Plants, 1725, all in German. Besides these there are extensive Latin treatises (1728-53) on Logic, Ontology, Cosmology, Empirical and Rational Psychology, Natural Theology, and all branches of Practical Philosophy. Detailed extracts may be found in Erdmann's Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung, ii. 2. The best account of the Wolffian philosophy has been given by Zeller (pp. 211-273).]

[Footnote 2: Eucken, Geschichte der Terminologie^ pp. 133-134.]

Wolff reaches his division of the sciences by combining the two psychological antitheses—the higher (rational) and lower (sensuous) faculties of cognition and appetition. On the first is based the distinction between the rational and the empirical or historical method of treatment. The latter concerns itself with the actual, the former with the possible and necessary, or the grounds of the actual; the one observes and describes, the other deduces. The antithesis of cognition and appetition gives the basis for the division into theoretical and practical philosophy. The former, called metaphysics, is divided into a general part, which treats of being in general whether it be of a corporeal or a spiritual nature, and three special parts, according to their principal subjects, the world, the soul, and God,—hence into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theology. The science which establishes rules for action and regards man as an individual being, as a citizen, and as the head or member of a family, is divided (after Aristotle) into ethics, politics, and economics, which are preceded by practical philosophy in general, and by natural law. The introduction to the two principal parts is furnished by formal logic.

Philosophy is the science of the possible, i.e., of that which contains no contradiction; it is science from concepts, its principle, the law of identity, its form, demonstration, and its instrument, analysis, which in the predicate explicates the determinations contained in the concept of the subject. In order to confirm that which has been deduced from pure concepts by the facts of experience, psychologia rationalis is supplemented by psychologia empirica, rational cosmology by empirical physics, and speculative theology by an experimental doctrine of God (teleology). Wolff gives no explanation how it comes about that the deliverances of the reason agree so beautifully with the facts of experience; in his naive, unquestioning belief in the infallibility of the reason he is a typical dogmatist.

A closer examination of the Wolffian philosophy seems unnecessary, since its most essential portions have already been discussed under Leibnitz and since it will be necessary to recur to certain points in our chapter on Kant. Therefore, referring the reader to the detailed accounts in Erdmann and Zeller, we shall only note that Wolff's ethics opposes the principle of perfection to the English principle of happiness (that is good which perfects man's condition, and this is life in conformity with nature or reason, with which happiness is necessarily connected); that he makes the will determined by the understanding, and assigns ignorance as the cause of sin; that his philosophy of religion, which argues for a natural religion in addition to revealed religion (experiential and rational proofs for the existence of God, and a deduction of his attributes), and sets up certain tests for the genuineness of revelation, favors a rationalism which was flexible enough to allow his pupils either to take part in orthodox movements or to advance to a deism hostile to the Church.

Among the followers of Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) deserves the first place, as the founder of German aesthetics (Aesthetica, 1750 seq.). He perceives a gap in the system of the philosophical sciences. This contains in ethics a guide to right volition, and in logic a guide to correct thinking, but there are no directions for correct feeling, no aesthetic. The beautiful would form the subject of this discipline. For the perfection (the harmonious unity of a manifold, which is pleasant to the spectator), which manifests itself to the will as the good and to the clear thinking of the understanding as the true, appears—according to Leibnitz—to confused sensuous perception as beauty. From this on the name aesthetics was established for the theory of the beautiful, though in Kant's great work it is used in its literal meaning as the doctrine of sense, of the faculty of sensations or intuitions. Baumgarten's pupils and followers, the aesthetic writer G.F. Meier at Halle, Baumeister, and others, contributed like himself to the dissemination of the Wolffian system by their manuals on different branches of philosophy. To this school belong also the following: Thuemmig (Institutiones Philosophia Wolfianae, 1725-26); the theologian Siegmund Baumgarten at Halle, the elder brother of the aesthete; the mathematician Martin Knutzen, Kant's teacher;[1] the literary historian Gottsched [2] at Leipsic; and G. Ploucquet, who in his Methodus Calculandi in Logicis, with a Commentatio de Arte Characteristica Universali appended to his Principia de Substantiis et Phaenomenis, 1753, took up again Leibnitz's cherished plan for a logical calculus and a universal symbolic language. The psychologist Kasimir von Creuz (Essay on the Soul, in two parts, 1753-54), and J.H. Lambert,[3] whom Kant deemed worthy of a detailed correspondence, take up a more independent position, both demanding that the Wolffian rationalism be supplemented by the empiricism of Locke, and the latter, moreover, in anticipation of the Critique of Reason, pointing very definitely to the distinction between content and form as the salient point in the theory of knowledge.

[Footnote 1: Benno Erdmann, M. Knutzen und seine Zeit, 1876.]

[Footnote 2: Th. W. Danzel, Gottsched und seine Zeit, 1848.]

[Footnote 3: Lambert: Cosmological Letters, 1761; New Organon, 1764; Groundwork of Architectonics, 1771. Bernoulli edited some of Lambert's papers and his correspondence.]

Among the opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, all of whom favor eclecticism, A. Ruediger[1] and Chr. Aug. Crusius,[2] who was influenced by Ruediger, and, like him, a professor at Leipsic, are the most important. Ruediger divides philosophy according to its objects, "wisdom, justice, prudence," into three parts—the science of nature (which must avoid one-sided mechanical views, and employ ether, air, and spirit as principles of explanation); the science of duty (which, as metaphysics, treats of duties toward God, as natural law, of duties to our neighbor, and deduces both from the primary duty of obedience to the will of God); and the science of the good (in which Ruediger follows the treatise of the Spaniard, Gracian, on practical wisdom). Crusius agrees with Ruediger that mathematics is the science of the possible, and philosophy the science of the actual, and that the latter, instead of imitating to its own disadvantage the deductive-analytical method of geometry, must, with the aid of experience and with attention to the probability of its conclusions, rise to the highest principles synthetically. Besides its deduction the determinism of the Wolffian philosophy gave offense, for it was believed to endanger morals, justice, and religion. The will, the special fundamental power of the soul (consisting of the impulses to perfection, love, and knowledge), is far from being determined by ideas; it is rather they which depend on the will. The application of the principle of sufficient reason, which is wrongly held to admit of no exception, must be restricted in favor of freedom. For the rest, we may note concerning Crusius that he derives the principle of sufficient reason (everything which is now, and before was not, has a cause) and the principle of contingency from the principles of contradiction, inseparability, and incompatibility, and these latter from the principle of conceivability; that he rejects the ontological argument, and makes the ground of obligation in morality consist in obedience toward God, and its content in perfection. Among the other opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, we may mention the theologian Budde(us)[3] (Institutiones Philosophiae Eclecticae, 1705); Darjes (who taught in Jena and Frankfort-on-the-Oder; The Way to Truth, 1755); and Crousaz (1744).

[Footnote 1: Ruediger: Disputatio de eo quod Omnes Idea Oriantur a Sensione, 1704; Philosophia Synthetica, 1707; Physica Divina, 1716; Philosophia Pragmatica, 1723.]

[Footnote 2: Crusius: De Usu et Limitibus Principii Rationis, 1743; Directions how to Live a Rational Life (theory of the will and of ethics), 1744; A Sketch of the Necessary Truths of Reason, 1745; Way to the Certainty and Trustworthiness of Human Knowledge, 1747.]

[Footnote 3: J.J. Brucker (Historia Critica Philosophiae, 5 vols., 1742-44; 2d ed., 6 vols., 1766-67) was a pupil of Budde.]

%3. The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy.%

After a demand for the union of Leibnitz and Locke, of rationalism and empiricism, had been raised within the Wolffian school itself, and still more directly in the camp of its opponents, under the increasing influence of the empirical philosophy of England,[1] eclecticism in the spirit of Thomasius took full possession of the stage in the Illumination period. There was the less hesitation in combining principles derived from entirely different postulates without regard to their systematic connection, as the interest in scholastic investigation gave place more and more to the interest in practical and reassuring results. Metaphysics, noetics, and natural philosophy were laid aside as useless subtleties, and, as in the period succeeding Aristotle, man as an individual and whatever directly relates to his welfare—the constitution of his inner nature, his duties, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God—became the exclusive subjects of reflection. The fact that, besides ethics and religion, psychology was chosen as a favorite field, is in complete harmony with the general temper of an age for which self-observation and the enjoyment of tender and elevated feelings in long, delightfully friendly letters and sentimental diaries had become a favorite habit. Hand in hand with this narrowing of the content of philosophy went a change in the form of presentation. As thinkers now addressed themselves to all cultivated people, intelligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites; the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers proper—who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i. p. 563), did not seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and desired only to disseminate it; who did not aim at the promotion of investigation, but the instruction of the public—but to a certain extent, also, of those who were conscious of laboring in the service of science. Among the representatives of the more polite tendency belong, Moses Mendelssohn[2] (1729-86); Thomas Abbt (On Death for the Fatherland, 1761; On Merit, 1765); J.J. Engel (The philosopher for the World, 1775); G.S. Steinbart (The Christian Doctrine of Happiness, 1778); Ernst Platner (Philosophical Aphorisms, 1776, 1782; on Platner cf. M. Heinze, 1880); G.C. Lichtenberg (died 1799; Miscellaneous Writings, 1800 seq.; a selection is given in Reclam's Bibliothek); Christian Garve (died 1798; Essays, 1792 seq.; Translations from the Ethical Works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Ferguson); and Friedrich Nicolai[3] (died 1811). Eberhard, Feder, and Meiners will be mentioned later among the opponents of the Kantian philosophy.

[Footnote 1: The influence of the English philosophers on the German philosophy of the eighteenth century is discussed by Gustav Zart, 1881.]

[Footnote 2: Mendelssohn: Letters on the Sensations, 1755; On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences, a prize essay crowned by the Academy, 1764; Phaedo, or on Immortality, 1767; Jerusalem, 1783; Morning Hours, or on the Existence of God, 1785; To the Friends of Lessing (against Jacobi), 1786; Works, 1843-44. Cf. on Mendelssohn, Kayserling, 1856, 1862, 1883.]

[Footnote 3: Nicolai: Library of Belles Lettres, from 1757; Letters on the Most Recent German Literature, from 1759; Universal German Library, from 1765; New Universal German Library, 1793-1805.]

Among the psychologists J.N. Tetens, whose Philosophical Essays on Human Nature, 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1] takes the first rank. The two thinkers evidently influenced each other. The three fold division of the activities of the soul, "knowing, feeling, and willing," which has now become popular and which appears to us self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in opposition to the twofold division of Aristotle and Wolff into "cognition and appetition," he established the equal rights of the faculty of feeling—which had previously been defended by Sulzer (1751), the aesthetic writer, and by Mendelssohn (1755, 1763, 1785). Besides Tetens, the following should be mentioned among the psychologists: Tetens's opponent, Johann Lossius (1775), an adherent of Bonnet; D. Tiedemann (Inquiries concerning Man, from 1777), who was estimable also as a historian of philosophy (Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791-97); Von Irwing (1772 seq.; 2d ed., 1777); and K. Ph. Moriz (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenlehre, from 1785). Basedow (died 1790), Campe (died 1818), and J.H. Pestalozzi (1745-1827) did valuable work in pedagogics.

[Footnote 1: Sensation gives the content, and the understanding spontaneously produces the form, of knowledge. The only objectivity of knowledge which we can attain consists in the subjective necessity of the forms of thought or the ideas of relation. Perception enables us to cognize phenomena only, not the true essence of things and of ourselves, etc.]

One of the clearest and most acute minds among the philosophers of the Illumination was the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus[1] (1694-1768), from 1728 professor in Hamburg. He attacks atheism, in whatever form it may present itself, with as much zeal and conviction as he shows in breaking down the belief in revelation by his inexorable criticism (in his Defense, communicated in manuscript to a few friends only). He obtains his weapons for this double battle from the Wolffian philosophy. The existence of an extramundane deity is proved by the purposive arrangement of the world, especially of organisms, which aims at the good—not merely of man, as the majority of the physico-theologists have believed, but—of all living creatures. To believe in a special revelation, i.e., a miracle, in addition to such a revelation of God as this, which is granted to all men, and is alone necessary to salvation, is to deny the perfection of God, and to do violence to the immutability of his providence. To these general considerations against the credibility of positive revelation are to be added, as special arguments against the Jewish and Christian revelations, the untrustworthiness of human testimony in general, the contradictions in the biblical writings, the uncertainty of their meaning, and the moral character of the persons regarded as messengers of God, whose teachings, precepts, and deeds in no wise correspond to their high mission. Jewish history is a "tissue of sheer follies, shameful deeds, deceptions, and cruelties, the chief motives of which were self-interest and lust for power." The New Testament is also the work of man; all talk of divine inspiration, an idle delusion, the resurrection of Christ, a fabrication of the disciples; and the Protestant system, with its dogmas of the Trinity, the fall of man, original sin, the incarnation, vicarious atonement, and eternal punishment, contrary to reason. The advance of Reimarus beyond Wolff consists in the consistent application of the criteria for the divine character of revelation, which Wolff had set up without making a positive, not to speak of a negative, use of them. His weakness[2] consists in the fact that, on the one hand, he contented himself with a rationalistic interpretation of the biblical narratives, instead of pushing on—as Semler did after him at Halle (1725-91)—to a historical criticism of the sources, and, on the other, held fast to the alternative common to all the deists, "Either divine or human, either an actual event or a fabrication," without any suspicion of that great intermediate region of religious myth, of the involuntary and pregnant inventions of the popular fancy.

[Footnote 1: H.S. Reimarus: Discussions on the Chief Truths of Natural Religion, 1754; General Consideration of the Instincts of Animals, 1762; Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshipers of God. Fragments of the last of these works, which was kept secret during its author's life, were published by Lessing (the well-known "Wolffenbuettel Fragments," from 1774). A detailed table of contents is to be found in Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift, 1862, by D. Fr. Strauss, included in the fifth volume of his Gesammelte Schriften.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. i. p. 102, p. 106 seq.]

The philosophico-religious standpoint of G.E. Lessing (1729-81), in whom the Illumination reached its best fruitage, was less one-sided. Apart from the important aesthetic impulses which flowed from the Laocoon (1766) and the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69), his philosophical significance rests on two ideas, which have had important consequences for the religious conceptions of the nineteenth century: the speculative interpretation of certain dogmas (the Trinity, etc.), and the application of the Leibnitzian idea of development to the history of the positive religions. By both of these he prepared the way for Hegel. In regard to his relation to his predecessors, Lessing sought to mediate between the pantheism of Spinoza and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter showed himself far superior to the Wolffians. He can be called a Spinozist only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone who expresses himself against a transcendent, personal God, and the unconditional freedom of the will. Moreover, in view of his critical and dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.[1]

[Footnote 1: A caution which Gideon Spicker (Lessings Weltanschauung, 1883) counsels us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of determinism, "I thank God that I must, and that I must the best." Among the numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G.E. Schwarz (1854), and Zeller (in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, 1870, incorporated in the second collection of Zeller's Vortraege und Abhandlungen, 1877); and on his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing's Nathan der Weise, 1864, as well as J.H. Witte's Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen, vol. i. (Lessing and Herder), 1880. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877, and Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xiv. pp, 478-482.—TR.]]

Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-comprehensive, living unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a certain kind of change; without life and action, without the experience of changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome. Things are not out of, but in him; nevertheless (as "contingent") they are distinct from him. The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent distinctions. God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold manner: he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he conceived them as single. Now God's thinking is creation, his ideas actualities. By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal image, the Son of God; the bond between God representing and God represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit. But when he conceived his perfections singly he created the world, in which these manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of particular beings. Every individual is an isolated divine perfection; the things in the world are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature, though in different degrees. Development is everywhere; at present the soul has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in the future it will have more. At first the actions of men were guided by obscure instinct; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will, and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct cognitions. Thus freedom is attained in the course of history—the rational and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he who is unfree obeys unconsciously.

Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality; but he rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive religions as necessary transition stages in its attainment. As natural religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers, without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in religious matters. Nevertheless the statutory and historical element is not a graft from without, but a shell organically grown around natural religion, indispensable for its development, and to be removed but gradually and by layers—when the inclosed kernel has become ripe and firm. The history of religions is an education of the human race through divine revelation; so teaches his small but thoughtful treatise of 1780.[1] As the education of the individual man puts nothing extraneous into him, but only gives him more quickly and easily that which he could have reached of himself, so human reason is illuminated by revelation concerning things to which it could have itself attained, only that without God's help the process would have been longer and more difficult—perhaps it would have wandered about for many millions of years in the errors of polytheism, if God had not been pleased by a single stroke (his revelation to Moses) to give it a better direction. And as the teacher does not impart everything to the pupil at once, but considers the state of development reached by him at each given period, so God in his revelation observes a certain order and measure. To the rude Jewish people he revealed himself first as a national God, as the God of their fathers; they had to wait for the Persians to teach them that the God whom they had hitherto worshiped as the most powerful among other gods was the only one. Although this lowest stage in the development of religion lacked the belief in immortality, yet it must not be lightly valued; let us acknowledge that it was an heroic obedience for men to observe the laws of God simply because they are the laws of God, and not because of temporal or future rewards! The first practical teacher of immortality was Christ; with him the second age of religion begins: the first good book of elementary instruction, the Old Testament, from which man had hitherto learned, was followed by the second, better one, the New Testament. As we now can dispense with the first primer in regard to the doctrine of the unity of God, and as we gradually begin to be able to dispense with the second in regard to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, so this New Testament may easily contain still further truths, which for the present we wonder at as revelations, until the reason shall learn to derive them from other truths already established. Lessing himself makes an attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the dogmas of the Trinity (see above), of original sin, and of atonement. Such an advance from faith to knowledge, such a development of revealed truths into proved truths of reason, is absolutely necessary. We cannot dispense with the truths of revelation, but we must not remain content with simply believing them, but must endeavor to comprehend them; for they have been revealed in order that they may become rational. They are, as it were, the sum which the teacher of arithmetic tells his pupils beforehand so that they may guide themselves by it; but if they content themselves with this solution—which was given merely as a guide—they would never learn to calculate. Hand in hand with the advance of the understanding goes the progress of the will. Future recompenses, which the New Testament promises as rewards of virtue, are means of education, and will gradually fall into disuse: in the highest stage, the stage of purity of heart, virtue will be loved and practiced for its own sake, and no longer for the sake of heavenly rewards. Slowly but surely, along devious paths which are yet salutary, we are being led toward that great goal. It will surely come, the time of consummation, when man will do the good because it is good, this time of the new, eternal Gospel, this third age, this "Christianity of reason." Continue, Eternal Providence, thine imperceptible march; let me not despair of thee because it is imperceptible, not even when to me thy steps seem to lead backward. It is not true that the straight line is always the shortest.