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By Root 3437 0

If it was merely a criterion, it can be reconciled with his popular views by means of what he calls 'metaphysical perfection'. Metaphysical perfection, as he uses the term, seems to mean quantity of existence. It is, he says, 'nothing but the magnitude of positive reality strictly understood'. He always argues that God created as much as possible; this is one of his reasons for rejecting a vacuum. There is a general belief (which I have never understood) that it is better to exist than not to exist; on this ground children are exhorted to be grateful to their parents. Leibniz evidently held this view, and thought it part of God's goodness to create as full a universe as possible. It would follow that the actual world would consist of the largest group of compossibles. It would still be true that logic alone, given a sufficiently able logician, could decide whether a given possible substance would exist or not.

Leibniz, in his private thinking, is the best example of a philosopher who uses logic as a key to metaphysics. This type of philosophy begins with Parmenides, and is carried further in Plato's use of the theory of ideas to prove various extra-logical propositions. Spinoza belongs to the same type, and so does Hegel. But none of these is so clear cut as Leibniz in drawing inferences from syntax to the real world. This kind of argumentation has fallen into disrepute owing to the growth of empiricism. Whether any valid inferences are possible from language to non-linguistic facts is a question as to which I do not care to dogmatize; but certainly the inferences found in Leibniz and other a priori philosophers are not valid, since all are due to a defective logic. The subject-predicate logic, which all such philosophers in the past assumed, either ignores relations altogether, or produces fallacious arguments to prove that relations are unreal. Leibniz is guilty of a special inconsistency in combining the subject-predicate logic with pluralism, for the proposition 'there are many monads' is not of the subject-predicate form. To be consistent, a philosopher who believes all propositions to be of this form should be a monist, like Spinoza. Leibniz rejected monism largely owing to his interest in dynamics, and to his argument that extension involves repetition, and therefore cannot be an attribute of a single substance.

Leibniz is a dull writer, and his effect on German philosophy was to make it pedantic and arid. His disciple Wolf, who dominated the German universities until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, left out whatever was most interesting in Leibniz, and produced a dry professorial way of thinking. Outside Germany, Leibniz's philosophy had little influence; his contemporary, Locke, governed British philosophy, while in France Descartes continued to reign until he was overthrown by Voltaire, who made English empiricism fashionable.

Nevertheless, Leibniz remains a great man, and his greatness is more apparent now than it was at any earlier time. Apart from his eminence as a mathematician and as the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, he was a pioneer in mathematical logic, of which he perceived the importance when no one else did so. And his philosophical hypotheses, though fantastic, are very clear, and capable of precise expression. Even his monads can still be useful as suggesting possible ways of viewing perception, though they cannot be regarded as windowless. What I, for my part, think best in his theory of monads is his two kinds of space, one subjective, in the perceptions of each monad, and one objective, consisting of the assemblage of points of view of the various monads. This, I believe, is still useful in relating perception to physics.

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PHILOSOPHICAL LIBERALISM

The rise of liberalism, in politics and philosophy, provides material for the study of a very general and very important question, namely: What has been the influence of political and social circumstances upon the thoughts of eminent and original thinkers, and, conversely, what has been the influence