II. RECENT WORK ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEIBNIZ. 1 BY B. RUSSELL. THE philosophy of Leibniz, his merits and demerits, and his place in the history of thought, have been hitherto universally and com- pletely misunderstood. This is to be accounted for partly by his sheer intellectual greatness, partly by the ignorance of editors, partly by his lack of leisure to compose a magnum opus, and partly also (it must be confessed) by his utter lack of moral ele- vation. This last cause led him to publish by preference his worst writings, to ruin the consistency of his system for the sake of orthodoxy, and to mislead the world (after his unsuccessful experiment with Arnauld) as to the grounds of his metaphysical tenets. Among the papers which he left unpublished, there is contained much that has a far higher value than any philosoph- ical treatise that he permitted the world to see. But here the editors become to blame. M. Couturat shows that a whole mine of the most valuable material has been left untouched by Erd- mann and Gerhardt, and that many opinions and methods, which had been known only in isolated fragments, belong really to syste- matic and life-long attacks on fundamental problems. No man more often or more gloriously than Leibniz missed a unit by aiming at a million. And if he failed to compose a magnum opus, M. Couturat shows that this was due to the vastness of the enter- prise that he undertook an enterprise surpassing the powers of a single man, but never assisted, in spite of urgent appeals, by any of his contemporaries. His philosophical successors, too, have smiled at his projects, until at last the mathematicians, if not completely, yet in a very large measure, have unwittingly realised them. For the true understanding of Leibniz, M. Couturat' s work is of the very first importance. It is based upon an extensive study 1 La Logique de Leibniz d'apres des documents inedits. Par Louis "Couturat, clarge de cours & 1'universite de Toulouse . Paris : Alcan, 1901. Pp. xiv., 608. Leibniz' system in xeinen wissenscha ft lichen Orundlagen, von Dr. EL Cassirer. Marburg : N. G. Elwertsche Verlags- buchhandlung, 1902. Pp. xiv., 548. 12
