Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Author:Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
Publisher: 1873 Press
Published: 2000-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

XI

Arnauld to Leibniz.

Sept. 28, 1686.

I thought, M., that I might make use of the liberty which you gave me to take my time in replying to your kindness; and therefore I have put it off, until I had completed a work which I had commenced. I have been a gainer in doing you justice, for there was never anything more honorable or more gracious than the manner in which you received my excuses. So much was not called for to make me resolve to acknowledge in good faith that I am satisfied with the manner in which you have explained what was startling to me at first, regarding the concept of the individual nature. For no man of honor should have any difficulty in accepting a truth as soon as it is made known to him. I have been above all struck by this argument, that in every affirmative true proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or singular, the concept of the attributes is comprised in some way in that of the subject. Predicatum inest subjecto.

There remains for me only the difficulty in regard to the possibility of things and in regard to this way of conceiving of God as though he had chosen the universe, which he created, out of an infinity of other possible universes which he saw at the same time and which he did not choose to create. But as this has nothing to do properly with the concept of the individual nature, and as I should have to meditate at too great length in order to make clear what I think about it or rather what I find to object to in the thoughts of others, because they do not seem to me to do justice to God's power, you will permit me to pass over this subject.

I would prefer to ask you to clear up two things which I find in your last letter. They seem to me important, but I do not understand them very well.

The first is as to what you mean by "the hypothesis of the concomitance and of the agreement of substances among themselves." You claim that by this means, that which happens in the union of the soul and the body and in the action or the passion of a mind with respect to any other created thing, can be explained. I cannot understand what you say in explaining this thought, which, according to you, agrees neither with those who think that the soul acts physically upon the body and the body upon the soul, nor with those who think that God alone is the physical cause of these effects, and that the soul and the body are only the occasional causes. You say, "God created the soul in such a way that for the ordinary events it has no need of these changes, and that which happens to the soul arises from its own being without its having to agree with the body in what results, any more than the body does with the soul.

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