CHAPTER VIII.

LEIBNITZ.

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LEIBNITZ was the first and last of Locke's great critics. He had studied the Essay on Human Understanding,' though he could not accept its principles. His arguments have formed the staple of objection against Locke; and from him they come with peculiar force, because they are parts of his system.

Leibnitz is a great name in philosophy and mathematics; but the nature of this work forbids our entering into any detailed examination of his claims. All that can here be done is to indicate the line of opposition which he took with respect to Locke's theory of the origin of Knowledge.

At first he answered Locke in a few paragraphs of a somewhat supercilious tone. He evidently looked upon the Essay' as not destined to achieve any influential reputation.* This opinion he lived to alter; and in his Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain,' he brought all his forces to bear upon the subject; he grappled with the Essay,' and disputed the ground with it inch by inch. This remarkable work was not published till many years after his death, and is not included in M. Duten's edition. Dugald Stewart was not

*See Réflexions sur l'Essai de M. Locke,' in the 'Recueil' of Desmaizeaux, vol. ii.

aware of its existence; and this fact will explain a passage in his 'Dissertation,' where he says Leibnitz always speaks coldly of Locke's Essay.' Leibnitz does so in his earlier works; but in the 'New Essays' he treats his great adversary with due respect; and in the Preface, speaks of him with eulogy.

The reader has heard Dr. Whewell speak of Locke, and can have appreciated his tone; let him now compare the language of the great Leibnitz, speaking of his rival:

it.

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"The Essay concerning Human Understanding,' written by an illustrious Englishman, being one of the finest and most esteemed works of our time, I have resolved to make some comments on Thus I shall procure a favourable introduction for my thoughts by placing them in such good company. It is true that I am often of a different opinion; but so far from detracting on that account from the merit of this celebrated writer, that I do him justice in making known in what and wherefore I differ from him, when I judge it necessary to prevent his authority from prevailing over reason on some important points. In fact, although the author of the Essay' says a thousand things which I must applaud, yet our systems greatly differ. His has greater affinity to that of Aristotle-mine, to that of Plato."

This is the spirit in which the Homeric heroes regard their adversaries; an interchange of admiration for each other's prowess does not deaden one of their blows, but it makes the combat more dignified.

Leibnitz belonged to the Cartesians; but he also mingled with the doctrines of Descartes certain

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ideas which he had gathered from his commerce with antiquity. Plato and Democritus especially influenced him. To a mind thus furnished the doctrines of Locke must needs have been unwelcome; indeed they could not expect to gain admission. Moreover, as F. Schlegel well observed, every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.* Leibnitz and Locke were examples of this antagonism: "Our differences," says Leibnitz, are important. The question between us is whether the soul in itself is entirely empty, like tablets upon which nothing has been written (tabula rasa) according to Aristotle and the author of the 'Essay;' and whether all that is there traced comes wholly from the senses and experience; or whether the soul originally contains the principles of several notions and doctrines, which the external objects only awaken on occasions, as I believe with Plato."

The nature of the problem is well stated here; and Leibnitz sides with Plato in his solution of it. The main arguments by which he supports his view are those so often since repeated of the Universality and Necessity of certain truths, and of the incapacity of experience to furnish us with anything beyond a knowledge of individual cares.

"For if any event can be foreseen before it has been tried, it is manifest that we contribute something for our own parts." Ergo, mere experience, it is argued, does not constitute all our knowledge. "The senses, although necessary for all actual knowledge, are not sufficient to give us all of it,

*Coleridge used to pass off this aphorism as his own. It is to be found, however, in Schlegel's 'Geschichte der Literatur.'

since the senses never can give but examples, that is to say particular or individual truths. But all the examples which confirm a general truth, however numerous, do not suffice to establish the universal necessity of that truth, for it does not follow that that which has once occurred will always occur in the same way."

Leibnitz continues 66 : Whence it appears that necessary truths, such as we find in mathematics, and particularly in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles of which the proof does not depend upon examples, nor consequently upon the senses, although without the senses one would never have thought of them. So also logic, metaphysics, and morals are full of such truths, and consequently their proofs can only come from those internal principles which are called innate."

Locke would perfectly have agreed with these premises, but the conclusion he would rightly have rejected. That the senses alone could not furnish us with any general truth he taught as expressly as Leibnitz; but he did not build his theory upon the senses alone.

Leibnitz, however, seems to have been misled by Locke's language in the first definition of Reflection; for he says, "Perhaps the opinions of our able author are not so far from mine as they appear to be. For after having employed the whole of his first book against innate knowledge taken in a certain sense, he acknowledges in the beginning of the second that there are ideas which do not originate from the senses, but arise from Reflection. Now reflection is nothing but attention to that which passes within us; and the senses do not convey to us what we already possess within ourselves.

Can it then be denied that there is much innate in the mind ?"

The passage in italics is a curious instance of how the mind, preoccupied with its own opinions, sees them reflected in the expressions of others.

Leibnitz here assumes the very point at issue; assumes that the mind has innate ideas which the senses cannot convey to it; and this assumption he supposes to be contained in Locke's words. Locke taught precisely the contrary.

"The mind is itself innate," continues Leibnitz (to which we reiterate our objection: innate in what? In itself? or in us? To say that it is innate in itself is a quibble; that it is innate in us, is a displacement of the question: no one ever doubted that the mind of man was born in manborn with man; the question is: Are there any ideas born with the mind, or are all ideas acquired by the mind?) "The mind is itself innate, and there are included in it substance, duration, change, action, perception, pleasure, and a thousand other objects of our intellectual ideas.... .I have used the comparison of a block of marble which has certain veins in it rather than a plain piece of marble such as the philosophers call tabula rasa ; because if the soul resembled tablets unwritten on, truths would be in us like the figure of Hercules is in the block of marble, when that marble may receive indifferently one figure or another. But if there are veins in the marble which mark the figure of Hercules rather than any other figure, that marble would be more determinate, and the figure of Hercules would in some way be innate, although labour would be necessary to discover the veins, and to free them from their envelope