Leibnitz.

There is a singular contrast between the form of Leibnitz’s writings and the character of his mind. The latter was systematical, even to excess. It was the vice of his prodigious intellect, on every subject of science where it was not bound by geometrical chains, to confine his view to those most general principles, so well called by Bacon “merely notional,” which render it, indeed, easy to build a system, but only because they may be alike adapted to every state of appearances, and become thereby really inapplicable to any. Though his genius was thus naturally turned to system, his writings were, generally, occasional and miscellaneous. The fragments of his doctrines are scattered in reviews; or over a voluminous literary correspondence, or in the prefaces and introductions to those compilations to which this great philosopher was obliged by his situation to descend. This defective and disorderly mode of publication arose partly from the conflicts between business and study, inevitable in his course of life; but probably yet more from the nature of his system, which while it widely deviates from the most general principles of former philosophers, is ready to embrace their particular doctrines under its own generalities, and thus to reconcile them to each other, as well as to accommodate itself to popular or established opinions, and compromise with them, according to his favourite and oft-repeated maxim, “that most received doctrines are capable of a good sense;” by which last words our philosopher meant a sense reconcilable with his own principles. Partial and occasional exhibitions of these principles suited better that constant negotiation with opinions, establishments, and prejudices, to which extreme generalities are well adapted, than would have a full and methodical statement of the whole at once. It is the lot of every philosopher who attempts to make his principles extremely flexible, that they become like those tools which bend so easily as to penetrate nothing. Yet his manner of publication perhaps led him to those wide intuitions, as comprehensive as those of Bacon, of which he expressed the result as briefly and pithily as Hobbes. The fragment which contains his ethical principles is the preface to a collection of documents illustrative of international law, published at Hanover in 1693 to which he often referred as his standard afterwards, especially when he speaks of Lord Shaftesbury, or of the controversy between the two great theologians of France. “Right,” says he, “is moral power; obligation, moral necessity. By “moral” I understand what with a good man prevails as much as if it were physical. A good man is he who loves all men as far as reason allows. Justice is the benevolence of a wise man. To love is to be pleased with the happiness of another; or, in other words, to convert the happiness of another into a part of one’s own. Hence is explained the possibility of a disinterested love. When we are pleased with the happiness of any being, his happiness becomes one of our enjoyments. Wisdom is the science of happiness.”