Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical ExpositionDewey, John
Philosophy
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition
Dewey, John
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716
one is demonstrated of the other. But as to substance it is different,
the one being natural, the other artificial. The nominal essence always
relates to sorts, or classes, and is a pattern or standard by which we
classify objects. In the individual there is nothing essential, in this
sense. "Particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be
found to have all their qualities equally essential to them, or, which
is more, nothing at all." As for the "real essence" which things have,
"we only suppose its being without precisely knowing what it is."
Locke here presents us with the confusion which, in one form or
another, is always found in empiricism, and which indeed is essential
to it. Locke, like the ordinary empiricist, has no doubt of the
existence of real things. His starting-point is the existence of two
substances, mind and matter; while, further, there is a great number of
substances of each kind. Each mind and every separate portion of matter
is a distinct substance. This supposed deliverance of common sense
Locke never called into question. Working on this line, all knowledge
will consist in abstraction from the ready-made things presented to us
in perception, "in leaving out from the complex idea of individuals"
something belonging to them. But on the other hand, Locke never doubts
that knowledge begins with sensation, and that, therefore, the process
of knowledge is one of adding simple, unrelated elements. The two
theories are absolutely opposed to each other, and yet one and the
same philosophical inference may be drawn from each; namely, that only
the particular is real, and that the universal (or relations) is an
artificial product, manufactured in one case by abstraction from the
real individual, in the other by compounding the real sensation.
The result is, that when he comes to a discussion of the extent of
knowledge, he admits knowledge of self, of God, and of "things,"
only by a denial of his very definition of knowledge, while knowledge
of other conceptions, like those of mathematics, is not knowledge of
reality, but only of ideas which we ourselves frame. All knowledge,
that is to say, is obtained only either by contradicting his own
fundamental notion, or by placing it in relations which are confessedly
artificial and superinduced. It is to this point that we come.
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