Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/452

 440 j. T. MEEZ'S LEIBNIZ. traces of the irony of fate. Unsystematised by its founder and modified by him from time to time as new facts and new points of view became apparent to him, it was reduced to rigid and abstract form by an unsympathetic follower, and it was this systematisation of it that influenced Kant and thus determined the manner in which Leibniz was to affect the development of speculation. Built on the ruins of Scholasticism, it gave rise to an equally dogmatic system in which the appeal to reason was worked as uncritically as it had formerly been the custom to use the doctrines of the Church. Leibniz himself was an early convert to the new way of interpreting nature ; but, in the hands of his follower, his system seemed to offer the means of con- structing science a priori. It is a remarkable fact that, while the subsequent progress of mathematics was due to the new method and symbolism of Leibniz, his original ideas in logic and psychology bore no fruit whatever, and scarcely attracted atten- tion till they had been arrived at afresh by independent investi- gators. Wolffs device of reducing the principle of Sufficient Reason to that of Contradiction no doubt seemed to him to supply the link that was wanting in Leibniz's system to render its logical concatenation complete ; but its only effect was to give knowledge the false appearance of h priori deduction, and thus to lay stress on the weakest part of Leibniz's philosophy. It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Merz's volume is the result of a sympathetic study of Leibniz in his own works, and not in the form in which, as systematised by Wolff, his thought became a factor in the historical development of German philo- sophy. The author will not even attempt to weave Leibniz's doctrines into a consistent system. This has been done by his- torians of philosophy, but, he says, " without sufficiently con- sidering whether if such a task had been undertaken by Leibniz himself he would not have found himself compelled to modify or amplify many of the views to which he clung tenaciously in his correspondence and casual writings " (p. 135). This remark is perhaps not uncalled for. More than -any other systematic philosopher, Leibniz kept his mind open to receive new views, and was always ready to assimilate the element of truth which he found in an opposed theory. But yet the central position of his own philosophy had been reached by him many years before his chief writings were produced. However unsystematic a writer, he was too systematic a thinker, and his philosophy was too intimately associated with life, for him to continue throwing out half-truths which had not been brought into connexion with his fundamental principles. There does not seem therefore to be any sufficient reason for denying that the various fragmentary expositions of Leibniz's thought were the result of a consistent Weltanschauung and that they are capable of systematic expression. But there is no doubt that Mr. Merz has done wisely in preferring in the present