Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/724



Since the “Secret of Hegel” was so brilliantly concealed some twenty-eight years ago, various attempts have been made to show that the philosopher par excellence has come and gone, unknown to a heedless and perverse generation. Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza, and even “good old Dr. Reid” have all had their worshippers. The exponents of these thinkers, however, have been willing to see some defects in their philosophical hero, while the author of this work can see none in Leibnitz. “The Monadology is the most perfect fruit of philosophical reflection, the most complete and brilliant system in the history of philosophy.” The reason why this has not been recognized long ago is that the current expositions of Leibnitz rest upon a radical misconception of his whole point of view, and therefore mistake every one of his doctrines. The source of the misconception is to be found in the assumption that Leibnitz developed his Monadology in a revolt from the Cartesian conception of Substance, whereas it really originated in the persistent endeavor to reconcile the mechanical view of the world, which had arisen from the new zeal for physical science, with the ancient and medieval idea of substantial forms. When we have got hold of this clue, we see at once that Leibnitz was not seeking to explain phenomena by any independent substantial reality, anything in itself, but his aim was to show that the external world itself has no reality apart from the activity of souls or monads. Accordingly he shows, by analysis of all the conceptions employed in the mechanical view of the world, that body as extended, moving, and resistant has only the reality of a well-ordered dream, while space and time are but the abstraction of the constant relations of coexistence and succession which obtain between phenomena. The only substantial realities are finite monads, and these again, though each is self-active or self-determined, are dependent for their continued existence upon God, the absolute substance or monad.

It is maintained by Leibnitz that, as body is divided to infinity, and therefore cannot be a real substantial unity, we are compelled