an entity really existing in nature, distinct from the body; which indeed is thoroughly self-evident; otherwise these two ideas might be put indifferently the one in the place of the other. For we may say that one single matter composes all bodies, but not that a single body composes all matter. Neither will we say, I think, that one matter is greater than another. Matter expresses the substance and solidity of body; thus we no more conceive different matters than differ ent solidities. But since matter has been taken as a name of something existing under this determination, this thought has produced unintelligible discourse and confused discussion upon materia prima.
Th. This example appears to me to serve rather to excuse than to blame the Peripatetic philosophy. If all silver were figured, or rather because all silver is figured by nature or art, is it less allowable to say that silver is an entity really existing in nature, distinct (taking it in its precision} from the plate or the money? You will not on that account say that silver is nothing else than certain qualities of money. Thus it is not so useless as you suppose to reason in general physics about materia prima and to determine its nature in order to know whether it is always uniform, whether it has some other property besides impenetrability (as I in fact have shown l after Kepler that it also has what may be called inertia), etc., although it is never found wholly pure; as it would be allow able to reason about pure silver, although we had none with us nor the means of purifying it. I do not at all disapprove what Aristotle has said about materia prima; 2 but one cannot 1 Cf. De ipsa natura, 1698, § 11, Gerhardt, Leibniz, philos. Schrift., 4, 510, Erdmann, 157, a, Jacques, 1, 462 (in French), Dntens, 2, Pt. II., 54, trans. Duncan, 119; Thdodicee, Pt. I., § 30, G. 6, 119, E. 512, a, J. 2, 89, Dutens, 1, 141 (in Latin); Specimen dijnnmicum, 1695, Pt, I., Gerhardt, Leibniz, math. Schrift., 6, 234 sq., Dntens, 3, 315 sq., trans. Appendix, 670 sq.; G. Leibniz, philos. Schrift., 4, 464-7, Dntens, 2, Pt. I., 234-7, two letters to the editor of the "Journal des Savans," in the numbers for June 18th, 1091, January, 1693, the first originally a fragment from a letter to Antonio Albert!, G. 7. 447-9; 5th letter to Clarke, § 102, G. 7, 414, E. 775, b, J. 2, 470, Duteiis, 2, 1(55, trans. Duncan, 280. In the letter to Jar. Thomasius, April 20-30, 1669 (cf. G. 1, 17, 18, 24), Leibnitz- affirmed that matter consisted of extension and inpenetrability only.
2 Cf. Zeller, Philos. d. Griech., 3d ed., 1879, II. 2 [Vol. 4], p. 320, note 2; and Bonitz, Ind. Arixt. (tub roc. vArj, in vol. 5 of Berlin Academy, ed. of Aristotle. Cf. also Gerhardt, Leibniz, philos. Schrift., 7, 259. — TR.
384 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [UK. in help blaming those who have stopped too soon and have con jured up chimeras out of the ill-understood words of this philosopher, who perhaps also has given too much occasion sometimes for this misconception and nonsense. But we should not exaggerate so much the defects of this celebrated author, because we know that many of his works were not completed or published by himself.
§ 17. Ph. The fifth abuse is the putting of words in the place of things which they do not and cannot in any way signify. It occurs when by the names of substances we mean to say something more than this: what I call gold is malleable (although at bottom then gold signifies nothing else than what is malleable), intending to have it understood that mallea bility depends upon the real essence of gold. Thus we say that it is right to define man with Aristotle as a reasonable animal; and that it is not right to define him with Plato as a two-legged animal without feathers and with broad nails. § 18. There is scarcely any one who does not suppose that these words signify a thing having a real essence upon which these properties depend; but it is a plain abuse when the complex idea signified by this word does not include this thing.
Th. For myself I should rather think that we are plainly wrong in censuring this common usage, since it is very true that in the complex idea of gold is included the thought that it is a thing having a real essence, whose constitution is un known to us in detail otherwise than that upon it depend such qualities as malleability. But in order to express its mallea bility without identity and without the defect of coccyxm or repetition (see chap. 8, § 18), J we must recognize this thing by other qualities, as color and weight. And it is as if we said that a certain fusible body, yellow and very heavy, called gold, has a nature which gives it besides the quality of being very soft to the hammer and capable of being made very thin. As for the definition of man attributed to Plato, which he appears to have made only for practice, and which you would not, I think, compare seriously with that which is received, it is manifestly a little too external and provisional; for if this Cassotvary, of which you recently spoke (chap. 6, § 34), had 1 The reference is incorrect. Perhaps chap. 6, § 18, is meant, or chap. 10, CH. x] ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 385 been found to have wide nails, it would be man; for it would not have been necessary to strip it of its feathers, as in the case of the cock which Diogenes, as they say, wished to make a Platonic man.1 § 19. Ph. In the mixed modes, as soon as an idea entering therein is changed, you at once recognize it as another thing, as plainly appears in the words, murder, which signifies in English (as Mordt in. German), homicide premeditated with design; manslaughter (a word corresponding in origin to homi cide), a voluntary but not premeditated homicide; chance- medley (a chance melee, according to the force of the word), homicide committed without design; for what is expressed by the names and what I think to be in the thing (which I called before nominal essence and real essence} is the same. But it is not so in the names of substances; for if one puts into the idea of gold what another leaves out, for example fixedness and solubility in aqua regia, men do not think for that reason that its species has been changed, but only that the one has a more perfect idea than the other of what constitutes the real con cealed essence to which the name of gold is given, although this secret relation is useless and serves only to involve us in diffi culties.
Tli. I think I have already made this statement; but I am going also to show you clearly here, that what you, sir, have just said, is found in the modes, as in the substances, and that we have no ground for censuring the internal essence for this relation. Here is an example: we may define a parabola, in the sense of the geometers, as a figure in which all the lines parallel to a certain straight line are united by thought in a certain point or focus. But it is rather the exterior and the effect which is expressed by this idea or definition, than the internal essence of this figure or what can at once make known its origin. We may at the beginning even doubt if such a figure as we wish and which ought to produce this effect is a possible thing; and it is this which with me shows whether a 1 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, c. 230-250, DC vitis, dor/matibus et apophthegmatis clarorum philosophonnn lib. decem, VI. 40: HAa™™? opto-a^ecov, "Avepionos eo-ri ^iaov SLTTOVV, OLirrepov, «ai. evSoKijUoCi'TO?, TiAas [AtoyeVrjs 6 KVUIV] aAeKTpvoi'a eitrrjreyKei' ei? TT\V <rxo\rjv avrov, xai $T]CTIV, OUTO? CCTTU' 6 IlAaT<oros apSpwTro?. odfv Tia bpa> TrpoaereBrj Tb n\a.Tvuivvxov. The definitions ascribed to Plato, and found in some editions of his works, are beyond doubt spurious. — TR.
2c 386 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [BK. in definition is only nominal and taken from the properties, or whether it is also real. But he who mentions the parabola and knows it only by the definition I have just spoken of, ceases not, when speaking of it, to understand a figure which has a certain construction and constitution unknown to him, biit which he wishes to learn in order to be able to draw it. Another who has examined it more thoroughly will add some other property, and will discover, for example, that in the figure asked for, the portion of the axis intercepted between the ordinate and the perpendicular drawn to the same point of the curve is always constant, and equal to the distance from the vertex to the focus. He will thus have a more per fect idea than the former, and will come more easily to the drawing of the figure, although he is not yet there. And, moreover, we shall agree that it is the same figure, the consti tution of which is still concealed. You see then, sir, that all that you have found and partly censured in the use of words signifying substances is also found and found plainly justified in the words signifying the mixed modes. But what has made you think that there was some difference between the sub stances and the modes,1 is merely the fact that you have not consulted here the intellectual modes difficult of discussion, which are found to resemble in all this bodies which are still more difficult to know.
§ 20. Ph. Thus I fear I must suppress what I Avished to say to you, sir, of the cause of what I have thought an abuse, as if it were because we falsely think that nature always acts with regularity and fixes limits to each species by this specific essence or internal constitution which we there understand and which always follows the same specific name.
Th. You see clearly then, sir, by the example of the geo metrical modes, that we are not wrong in referring them to internal and specific essences, although there is great differ ence between sensible things, whether substances, or modes, of which we have only nominal provisional definitions, and of which we do not readily hope for real ones, and between the intellectual modes, difficult of discussion since we can at last reach the internal constitution of the geometrical figures.
1 Jacques reads: " c'est que vous n'avez point consulte," etc. Gerhardt and Erdmanu read: "n'est que vous," etc. — TR.
i-ii. x] ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 387 § 21. Ph. [I see at last that I should have been wrong in laying the blame of this relation upon the essences and internal constitutions, under the pretext that this would render our words signs of nothing or of an unknown something. For what is unknown in certain respects may make itself known in another way, and the inner nature may partly reveal itself by the phenomena whicli spring from it. And as for the question: whether a monstrous foetus is a man or not? I see that, if it cannot be decided at once, this fact does not prevent the species from being well fixed in itself, our ignorance nowise changing anything in the nature of things.]
Tit. In fact, some very clever geometers have chanced to possess insufficient knowledge as to what the figures were, many qualities of which seemingly exhaustive of the subject they knew. For example, there were some lines called pearls,1 of which there were given indeed the quadratures and the measure of their surfaces and of the solids made by their revolution, before it was known that they were only a com position of certain cubic paraboloids. Thus in considering beforehand these pearls as a particular species, they had only provisional knowledge of them. If this may happen in geom etry, do you wonder that it is difficult to determine the species of corporeal nature which are incomparably more complex?
§ 22. Ph. Let us pass to the sixth abuse in order to con tinue the enumeration begun, although I see clearly that some of the points must be struck from the list. This general but little noticed abuse is this: men having by long use attached certain ideas to certain words, imagine that this connection is manifest and that everybody agrees to it. Whence it comes that they feel very strange, when asked the meaning of the words they employ, when indeed the question is an absolutely necessary one. There are few people who do not take it as an 1 C'f. Neic Essays, Bk. IT., chap. 7, § 4, Th. infra, p. 465. Rene Francois Walter de Sluse, 1622-1685, a Flemish geometer, canon of Liege cathedral, and author of the method for the construction of the roots of equations of the 3d and 4th degree, "which consists in reducing the resolution of the proposed equation to that of the system of two equations representing two conies, by introducing an unknown auxiliary whose elimination reproduces the primitive equation." He developed this method in his Mesolabium et problemata solida, etc., 4to, Leodii Elmronum, 1(1(38. Leibnitz mentions this work in a letter to Hobbes, 13-22 July, 1670, Gerhardt, Leibniz, philos. Schrift., 7, 573. — TR.
388 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [me. in affront if asked what they mean when speaking of life. But the vague idea they may have of it is insufficient when the question arises as to the knowledge whether a plant, already formed in the seed, or a pullet in the egg not yet in process of incubation, or a man in a swoon without sense or motion, has life. And although men do not wish to appear so little intelligent or so obtrusive as to find it necessary to ask for an explanation of the terms used, nor critics so disagreeable as to censure others unceasingly for the use they make of words, nevertheless when it is a question of exact research, such explication is necessary. Often scholars of different parties in the reasonings they display the one against the other merely speak different languages and think the same thing, although perhaps their interests are different.
Th. I think I have explained sufficiently my views upon the notion of life, which must always be accompanied by per ception in the soul; otherwise it would be only an appearance, as the life which the American savages attributed to watches or clocks, or which those magistrates attributed to the mario nettes, who believed them animated by demons, when they desired to punish as a sorcerer the one who had first pre sented this spectacle in their city.
§ 23. Ph. In conclusion, words serve (1) to make our thoughts understood, (2) to do this easily, and (3) to furnish entrance into the knowledge of things. Words fail at the first point, when they have no definite and constant idea either received or understood by others. § 23. They fail in facility, when they have very complex ideas, without distinct names; this is often the fault of the languages themselves which have no names; often also of the man who is ignorant of them; in that case extensive paraphrases are necessary. § 24. But when the ideas signified by the words do not agree with what is real, they fail in the third point. § 2G. (1) He who has terms without ideas is like a man who has only a catalogue of books. § 27. (2) He who has very complex ideas is like a man who has a quantity of books in loose sheets without titles, and who could not give the book save by giving the sheets in succession. § 28. (3) He who is not constant in the use of signs is like a merchant who sells different goods under the same name. § 29. (4) He who attaches particular CH. x] ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 389 ideas to received words cannot enlighten others by the light he may have. § 30. (5) He who has in his head ideas of sub stances which never had existence, cannot advance in real knowledge. § 33. The first will speak in vain of the taran tula or of charity. The second will see new animals Avithout being able easily to show them to others. The third will take body sometimes as a solid, sometimes as a mere exten sion; and by frugality he will designate sometimes the virtue, sometimes the kindred vice. The fourth will call a mule by the name horse, and what everybody calls prodigal will be to him generous; and the fifth will seek in Tartary on the authority of Herodotus l a nation composed of men having only one eye. I remark that the first four defects are common to the names of substances and modes, but that the last is pecu liar to substances.
Th. Your remarks are very instructive. I will only add that you seem to have something chimerical still in your ideas of the accidents or forms of being; and so the fifth defect is also common to substances and to accidents. The extravagant shepherd was not so, only because he believed there were nymphs concealed in the trees, but also because he always expected romantic adventures.
§ 34. Ph. I had thought to conclude, but I remember the seventh and last abuse, which is that of figurative terms or allusions. But there will be difficulty in thinking it an abuse, because what is called wit and imagination is better received than truth wholly dry. It goes well in discourse where you only seek to please; but at bottom, order and clearness ex- cepted, all the art of rhetoric, all these artificial and figura tive applications of words, serve only to insinuate false ideas, to excite the passions and seduce the judgment, so that they are nothing but pure frauds. Nevertheless this fallacious art is given the first rank and rewards. It is evident that men care but little for truth and much prefer to deceive and to be deceived. This is so true that I doubt not that what I have just said against this art is regarded as the result of an extreme audacity. Eor eloquence, like the fair sex, has charms too powerful to alloAV itself to be opposed.
390 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [BK. in Th. Very far from censuring your zeal for the truth, I find it just. And would that it might be effective. I do not wholly despair of it, because you seem to me, sir, to combat eloquence with its own weapons, and to have an eloquence of another species superior to this deceptive kind, as there was a Venus Urania, mother of divine love, before whom this other bastard Venus, mother of a blind love, dared not appear with her child with eyes blinded.1 But that indeed proves that your thesis needs some moderation, and that certain adorn ments of eloquence are like the Egyptian vases which you could use in the worship of the true God. It is as in painting and music, which are abused, one of which often represents grotesque and even hurtful imaginations, and the other softens the heart, and the two amuse in vain; but they can be usefully employed, the one to render the truth clear, the other to make it effective, and this last result must be also that of poetry which contains rhetoric and music.
CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XI OF THE REMEDIES WHICH MAY BE APPLIED TO THE IMPER FECTIONS AND ABUSES JUST SPOKEN OF § 1. Ph. This is not the place to plunge into this discussion upon the use of a true eloquence, and still less to reply to your obliging compliment, since we ought to think of bringing this matter of icords to an end, by seeking the remedies for the imperfections we have noticed therein. § 2. It would be ridic ulous to attempt to reform the languages, and to desire to com pel men to speak only according to the measure of their knowl edge. § 3. But it is not too much to desire that philosophers speak exactly, when the question concerns a serious search for the truth: without this all will be full of error, opiniativeness, and vain disputes. § 8. The first remedy is to use no word 1 For the myth here referred to by Leibnitz, cf. Plato, Symposium, 180, D, Jowett's trans'. Vol. 2, p. 32, 2<1 ed., 1875, Vol. i, p. 550, 3d ed., 1892: Pnusa- nias, ft, 1(5, 3; also Harrison- Verrall, Mytholof/j/ and Monuments of Ancient Atfu'nx, 212 Kg., London, Macraillan & Co., 1S90; Preller, Griech. Mythol., 2d en. xi] OX HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 391 without attaching thereto an idea, instead of frequently em ploying words like instinct, sympathy, antipathy, without attaching any sense to them.
Th. The rule is good; but I know not whether the examples are pertinent. Everybody seems to understand by instinct an inclination of an animal to what is proper for it, without on that account apprehending its reason; and men indeed ought less to neglect these instincts, which they discover moreover in themselves, although their artificial method of living has for the most part nearly effaced them; the physician of his own accord, indeed, has carefully observed it. Sympathy or antipathy signifies that which in bodies destitute of feeling corresponds to the instinct for union or separation found in animals. And although we have no such knowledge of the cause of these inclinations or tendencies, as is to be desired, we nevertheless have a notion of them sufficient to discourse of them intelligibly.
§ 9. Ph. The second remedy is that the ideas of the names of the modes at least be determined and, § 10. that the ideas of the names of substances be more conformed to what exists. If any one says that justice is conduct conformed to the law relating to the good of another, this idea is not sufficiently determined, so long as we have no distinct idea of that which is called law.
Th. We might say here that the law is a precept of wisdom or of the science of happiness.
§ 11. Ph. The third remedy is to employ terms so far as possible in conformity with received usage. § 12. The fourth is to declare in what sense we take the words, whether we coin new ones or employ the old in a new sense, (or) whether we find that use has not sufficiently fixed their mean ing. § 13. But there is some difference. § 14. The words for simple ideas which cannot be defined, are explained by synony mous words, when they are better known, or by showing the thing. It is by these means that we can make a peasant un derstand what the color feuille morte is. by telling him that it is that of dry leaves which fall in the autumn. § 15. The names of the mixed modes should be explained by definition, for that is possible. § 16. It is upon this ground that ethics is suscepti ble of demonstration. We shall take man as a corporeal 392 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [BK. in rational being without troubling ourselves about his external figure, § 17. for it is by means of definitions that the matters of morality may be clearly treated. We shall rather define justice according to the idea we have in our mind than seek a model therefor outside of us, as Aristides, and form it thereupon. § 18. And as the majority of the mixed modes nowhere exist together, we can fix them in defining them only by the enumeration of that which is scattered. § 19. In substances there are ordinarily some directing or characteristic qualities which we consider as the most distinc tive idea of the species, to which we suppose the other ideas forming the complex idea of the species are attached. It is form in vegetables and animals, and color in animate bodies, and in some color and form together. This is why, § 20. the definition of man given by Plato is more characteristic than that of Aristotle; or why we should not cause the death of monstrous productions, § 21. and often sight avails as much as any other test; for persons accustomed to test gold often distinguish by sight the true from the false, the pure from that which has been adulterated.
Th. Everything doubtless returns to the definitions which may extend even to primitive ideas. One and the same sub ject may have several definitions, but the knowledge that they agree with themselves, must be learned by reason, by demon strating one definition by another, or by experience, by proving that they constantly go together. As for morality, one part is wholly grounded in reason; but there is another depending upon experience and related to the disposition. For a knowl edge of substances, form and color, i.e. the visible, gives us the first ideas, because it is by these that we know things at a distance; but they are ordinarily too provisional, and in things of importance to us we try to know substance more closely. I am astonished, moreover, that you return again to the definition of man, attributed to Plato, since you have just yourself stated, § 16. that in morals man must be taken as a corporeal rational being without troubling ourselves about the external form. For the rest it is true that a large practice does much for discerning at sight what another may scarcely know through arduous experiments. And physicians of large experi ence, with very good sight and memory, often know at the first en. xi] ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 393 appearance the disease which another will draw out for himself with difficulty by force of questioning and trying the pulse. But it is well to unite all the indications we may have.
§ 22. Ph. I admit that he to whom a good assayer makes known all the qualities of gold, will have a better knowledge of them than sight could give. But if we could learn its in ternal constitution, the meaning of the word gold would be as easily determined as that of the triangle.
Th. It would be wholly as determined, and it would have in it no provisional element; but it would not be so easily deter mined. For I think a distinction a little prolix would be necessary in order to explain the contexture of gold, as is the case indeed in geometry with figures whose definition is long.
§ 23. Ph. Spirits separated from bodies have doubtless knowledge more perfect than ours, although we have no notion of the manner in which they may acquire it. But they may have as clear ideas of the radical constitution of bodies, as we have of a triangle.
Th. I have already remarked, sir, that I have reasons for thinking that no created spirits exist entirely separate from bodies; but there are no doubt some whose organs and under standing are incomparably more perfect than ours, and which surpass us in every kind of conception, as much and more than Mr. Frenicle,1 or that Swedish boy of whom I have spoken to you, surpassed the common run of men in the calculation of numbers, made by imagination.
§ 24. Ph. We have already noticed that the definitions of substances which may serve in explaining names are imperfect in relation to the knowledge of things. For usually we put 1 Cf. Gerhardt, Leibniz, philos. Schrift., 4, 319. Bernard Frenicle de Bessy, c. 1005-1(575, brother of the poet Nicolas Fre'niele, 1000-1001, "conseiller a la cour des monnaies," member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, who acquired the reputation of being the first arithmetician of his age by the rapidity with which lie solved the most complicated numerical problems, and by his ingen ious researches upon the solution in whole numbers of indeterminate equations. His method, known as the method of exclusions, appears to have been an inge nious groping, but based on some general propositions which greatly restricted this groping, and which have since been rigorously demonstrated by Leonard Euler, 1707-1783 and Jos. Louis Lagrange, 1730-1813. Pierre de Fermat, 1001- 1005, and Descartes. 1590-1050, greatly admired his work, astonished that he could go so far without the aid of algebra and that his arithmetic could con duct him where analysis finds so much difficulty in going. His principal work was, Traite des triangles, rectangles en nombre, Paris, 1070. — TK.
394 LEIBNITZ'S CRITIQUE OF LOCKE [UK. in