Notable/Famous Quotes from Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition

“He who knows me only by my writings does not know me,” said Leibniz.

The perpetual and ubiquitous presence of motion reveals the pulsations of Life; the correlation, the rationality, of these motions indicate the guiding presence of Life. This idea is the alpha and omega of his philosophy.

The soul of man is the world come to consciousness of itself.

The fact that the “Nouveaux Essais” of Leibniz have escaped the oblivion of the philosophical criticism of his day is proof, if proof still be needed, of the reasoned basis, the width of grasp, the fertility of suggestion which characterize the thought of Leibniz.

Sensation stands on the border-line between the world of nature and the realm of soul.

Morality is practically intuitive in the sense that all men tend to aim at the Good, and have an instinctive feeling of what makes towards the Good.

The externally conditioned is matter; the internally conditioned, the self-explanatory, is self-active, or spirit.

“As for him in Ireland who questions the reality of ‘bodies,’ he seems neither to offer what is rational, nor sufficiently to explain his own ideas. I suspect that he is one of those men who are desirous of making themselves known through paradoxes.”

Substance, which is merely a support behind qualities, is unknowable, and hence unverifiable.

The progress of knowledge consists in the development or unfolding of this implicit content, till intelligence, spirit, activity, is clearly revealed as the source and condition of all.

…spirits, entering through reason and eternal truths into a kind of society with God, are members of the city of God,—that is, of the most perfect state, formed and governed by the best of monarchs.

It would be a grievous blunder to suppose that this final chapter annihilates the earlier ones… Such thoughts as that substance is activity; that its process is measured by its end, its idea; that the universe is an inter-related unit; the thoughts of organism, of continuity, of uniformity of law,—introduced and treated as Leibniz treated them,—are imperishable.

“The mechanical is unbounded in range, but is subordinate in value.”