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
In this respect the feeling of Plato that God geometrizes found
an echoing response in Leibniz. But the latter would hardly have
expressed it in the same way. He would have preferred to say that God
everywhere uses the infinitesimal calculus. In the applicability of the
calculus to the discussion of physical facts, Leibniz saw two truths
reflected,--that everything that occurs has its reason, its dependent
connection upon something else, and that all is continuous and without
breaks. While the formal principles of his logic are those of identity
and contradiction, his real principles are those of sufficient reason
and of continuity. Nature never makes leaps; everything in nature has
a sufficient reason why it is as it is: these are the philosophic
generalizations which Leibniz finds hidden in the applicability
of mathematics to physical science. Reason finds itself everywhere
expressed in nature; and the law of reason is unity in diversity,
continuity.
Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of
mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character
of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be
understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions
are fundamentally mathematical laws,--laws of reason. Hence force,
activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature
is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean
Intelligence. Furthermore, as the fundamental law of intelligence is
the production of difference in unity, the primary law of physical
change must be the manifestation of this unity in difference,--or,
as Leibniz interpreted it, continuity. In nature there are no breaks,
neither of quantity nor of quality nor of relationship. The full force
of this law we shall see later.
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