No. 6.]
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
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and suggestive character. Even the ample citation of passages from Leibnitz will be found of great value, and the exposition is in my opinion on the whole sound. The main defects of the book seem to me to be its too polemical character, which prevents either completeness of statement or proper perspective, and its almost childlike faith in Leibnitz as the only genuine philosopher. There is no doubt that Leibnitz marks a most important advance in the development of modern philosophy, but he cannot be regarded as the exponent of an ultimate synthesis. His system is valuable rather because it states a series of problems than because it solves them. To show this in detail would be a long task, and I shall limit myself to one or two points. (1) The category of force by which he seeks to determine the ultimate nature of reality cannot be regarded as final. For, when all forms of reality are so characterized, we are abstracting from the differences by which the various orders of existence are determined. Hence Leibnitz is compelled to conceive of self-conscious beings as in their essence identical with beings not self-conscious. (2) Every monad contains in itself potentially the whole series of acts by which it is realized; in other words, each monad is what it is even apart from the process through which it passes. This view seems to me inadequate. We cannot regard any reality as being what it is apart from the process by which it realizes itself. Hence Leibnitz, in his conception of substance, as containing summed up all that it becomes, makes the whole process of realization superfluous; he is really separating the unity of the being from all that gives it meaning, and then speaking of it as if it were still real. The best that can be said for Leibnitz is that he means to affirm the relativity of unity and difference, and that he is feeling after the category of self-consciousness as the only ultimate conception. But though his intention is good, his performance leaves much to be desired. (3) Dillmann maintains that for Leibnitz God is substance alongside of other substances–apparently without the least perception of the insuperable difficulties involved in such a conception. He does not even do justice to one aspect of Leibnitz’s doctrine, but it may be admitted that this is the prevalent idea which Leibnitz countenances. Hence the thoroughly inconsistent conception of a choice between an infinite number of possible worlds. Nothing can be more easily shown than that the opposition of possible and actual worlds is untenable. The only possible world is the actual, unless we are to suppose that infinite reason may contradict itself.
John Watson.
