A Rebuttal of a Rebuttal
Some books argue with their subject. This one argues with a book that was already arguing with someone else. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent the early 1700s composing a line-by-line response to John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” staging it as a dialogue between a Locke stand-in and a Leibniz stand-in so thorough it ran to hundreds of pages — and then, on learning that Locke had died before he could publish it, quietly shelved the whole manuscript rather than attack a man who could no longer answer back. The “Nouveaux Essais” surfaced only decades after both philosophers were gone, a posthumous argument between two people who never got to have it. What John Dewey does here, in 1888, is step into that unfinished argument as a referee: not translating Leibniz, not editing him, but building a “critical exposition” that reconstructs what Leibniz was actually trying to say, why he thought Locke had gotten the mind wrong, and where — Dewey doesn’t flinch from saying so — Leibniz got himself into trouble too.
That layering is what makes the book more interesting than a straightforward summary would be. You are reading a young American philosopher’s account of a German rationalist’s private argument with an English empiricist, conducted across two centuries and never once face to face.
The Twenty-Nine-Year-Old Behind the Type
It’s worth knowing who is doing the arguing. Dewey was not yet the name American readers now associate with pragmatism and progressive education — that Dewey was still ahead of him. In 1888 he was twenty-nine, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan about to leave for a year at Minnesota, and this was only his second book, written under the wing of his Michigan mentor George Sylvester Morris for a series called “German Philosophical Classics for English Readers and Students.” Morris had trained under German idealists and passed that orientation to Dewey; you can feel it in every chapter here, in the confidence with which Dewey treats “harmony,” “organism,” and the unity of nature and spirit as the measure of a philosophy’s worth. This is Dewey before the break — before Darwin, William James, and the Chicago Laboratory School pushed him toward the instrumentalism that made him famous. Read alongside his later work, it’s a document of the philosopher he very nearly became instead: a fluent, sympathetic Hegelian idealist, still finishing his intellectual apprenticeship in public.
Reading Leibniz Against the Grain of Locke
Dewey structures the exposition to follow the shape of Leibniz’s own dialogue: a biographical account of Leibniz’s restless career as diplomat, mathematician, and librarian; a reconstruction of his central category of “force” and the harmony he thought ran through all existence; and then chapter after chapter tracking the actual points of collision with Locke — innate ideas versus the mind as blank slate, the reality of substance, the relation of matter to spirit, the nature and limits of human knowledge, and finally Leibniz’s theology, with its famous doctrine of a pre-established harmony between the “kingdom of nature” and the “kingdom of grace.” Dewey clearly admires the ambition of it all, the way Leibniz refuses to let science and religion, mechanism and purpose, sit in separate rooms. But the final chapter turns sharply critical, arguing that Leibniz’s old-fashioned formal logic couldn’t actually support the organic, relational picture of the universe he was reaching for — a gap Dewey traces forward into Kant, who inherited the problem without ever quite admitting the debt.
Why a Forgotten Monograph Still Repays the Trouble
Nobody assigns this book today the way they assign “Democracy and Education.” It has never had a Hollywood afterlife, never been excerpted in an anthology of “great American essays.” What it offers instead is something rarer: an unguarded look at how a major thinker’s mind worked before he became the thinker we remember, tested against one of the strangest and richest philosophical arguments of the early modern period. If you already know Leibniz through the tidy monad-and-windowless-substance summaries of a survey course, this is the long version — patient, occasionally combative, and willing to let Leibniz’s stranger theological commitments stand instead of tidying them away. And if you know Dewey only from his classroom-reform writing decades later, this is the version of him still working out, sentence by sentence, what he thought a philosophy needed to hold together to be worth believing.