John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics
content in an organic unity, which is activity. The essence of a substance, says Leibniz, consists in that regular tendency of action by which its phenomena follow one another in a certain order; and that order, as he repeatedly states, is the order in which the universe itself is arranged.
The activity of a monad may be advantageously compared to that of a supposed atom, granting, for the sake of the illustration, that there is such a thing. Each is in a state of change: the atom changes its place, the monad its representation, and each in the simplest and most uniform way that its conditions permit. How, then, is there such a similarity, such a monotony, in the change of an atom, and such variety and complexity in the change of a monad? It is because the atom has merely parts, or external variety, while the monad has an internal variety. Multiplicity is organically wrought into its very being. It has an essential relation to all things in the universe; and to say that this relation is essential, is to say that it is one which constitutes its very content, its being. Hence the cause of the changes of the monad, of their variety and complexity, is one with the cause of the richness, the profusion, the regulated variety of change in the universe itself. While we have employed a comparison with atoms, this very comparison may serve to show us the impossibility of atoms as they are generally defined by the physicist turned philosopher. Atoms have no internal and essential relation to the world; they have no internal connection with any one thing in the world: and what is this but to say that they do not enter anywhere into the structure of the world? By their very conception they are forever aliens, banished from any share or lot in the realm of reality. The idea which Leibniz never lets go, the idea which he always accentuates, is, then, the idea of an individual activity which in its continual change manifests as its own internal content and reality that reality and those laws of connection which make up the world itself.
We are thus introduced naturally to the conception which plays so large a part in the Leibnizian philosophy, that of pre-established harmony. This term simply names the fact, which we see to be fundamental with Leibniz,—the fact that, while the form of every monad is individuality, a unique principle of action, its content is universal, the very being and laws of the world. For we must now notice more explicitly what has been wrapped up in the idea all along. There is no direct influence of monads upon each other. One cannot affect another causally. There is no actual interaction of one upon another. Expressed in that figurative language which was ever natural to Leibniz, the monads have no windows by which anything can get in or out. This follows, of course, from the mutual independence and individuality of the monads. They are a true democracy, in which each citizen has sovereignty. To admit external influences acting upon them is to surrender their independence, to deny their sovereignty. But we must remember the other half. This democracy is not after the Platonic conception of democracy, in which each does as it pleases, and in which there is neither order nor law, but the extremest assertion of individuality. What each sovereign citizen of the realm of reality expresses is precisely law. Each is an embodiment in its own way of the harmony, the order, of the whole kingdom. Each is sovereign because it is dynamic law,—law which is no longer abstract, but has realized itself in life. Thus another way of stating the doctrine of pre-established harmony is the unity of freedom and necessity. Each monad is free because it is individual, because it follows the law of its own activity unhindered, unretarded, by others; it is self-determined. But it is self-determined to show forth the order, the harmony, of the universe. There is nothing of caprice, of peculiarity, in the content of the monad. It shows forth order; it is organized by law; it reveals the necessary connections which constitute the universe. The pre-established harmony is the unity of the individual and the universe; it is the organic oneness of freedom and necessity.
We see still further what it means when we learn that it is by this conception that Leibniz reconciles the conceptions of physical and final causation. There is no principle closer to the thought of Leibniz than that of the equal presence and efficiency everywhere of both physical and final causes. Every fact which occurs is susceptible of a mechanical and of a rational explanation. It is necessarily connected with preceding states, and it has a necessary end which it is fulfilling. The complete meaning of this principle will meet us hereafter; at present we must notice that it is one form of the doctrine of pre-established harmony. All things have an end because they form parts of one system; everything that occurs looks forward to something else and prepares the way for it, and yet it is itself mechanically conditioned by its antecedents. This is only another way of saying that there is complete harmony between all beings in the universe; so that each monad in fulfilling the law of its own existence contributes to the immanent significance of the universe. The monads are co-ordinated in such a way that they express a common idea. There is a plan common to all, in which each has its own place. All are making towards one goal, expressing one purpose. The universe is an organism; and Leibniz would have applied to it the words which Milne-Edwards applied to the human organism, as I find them quoted by Lewes: “In the organism everything seems to be calculated with one determined result in view; and the harmony of the parts does not result from the influence which they exert upon one another, but from their co-ordination under the rule of a common force, a preconceived plan, a pre-existent force.” That is to say, the universe is teleological, both as a whole and in its parts; for there is a common idea animating it and expressed by it; it is mechanical, for this idea is realized and manifested by the outworking of forces.
It ought to be evident even from this imperfect sketch that the Leibnizian theory of pre-established harmony is not that utterly artificial and grotesque doctrine which it is sometimes represented to be. The phrase “pre-established harmony” is, strictly speaking, tautologous. The term “pre-established” is superfluous. It means “existent.” There is no real harmony which is not existent or pre-established. An accidental harmony is a contradiction in terms. It means a chaotic cosmos, an unordered order, a lawless law, or whatever else is nonsensical.
Harmony, in short, means relation, means connection, means subordination and co-ordination, means adjustment, means a variety, which yet is one. The Leibnizian doctrine is not a factitious product of his imagination, nor is it a mechanical scheme for reconciling a problem which has no existence outside of the bewildered brains of philosophers. It is an expression of the fact that the universe is one of order, of continuity, of unity; it is the accentuating of this doctrine so that the very essence of reality is found in this ordered combination; it is the special application of this principle to the solution of many of the problems which “the mind of man is apt to run into,”—the questions of the relation of the individual and the universal, of freedom and necessity, of the physical and material, of the teleological and mechanical. We may not be contented with the doctrine as he presents it, we may think it to be rather a summary and highly concentrated statement of the problem than its solution, or we may object to details in the carrying out of the doctrine. But we cannot deny that it is a genuine attempt to meet a genuine problem, and that it contains some, if not all, of the factors required for its adequate solution. To Leibniz must remain the glory of being the thinker to seize upon the perfect unity and order of the universe as its essential characteristic, and of arranging his thoughts with a view to discovering and expressing it.
We have but to notice one point more, and our task is done so far as it serves to make plain the standpoint from which Leibniz criticised Locke. There is, we have seen, the greatest possible continuity and complexity in the realm of monads. There is no break, quantitative nor qualitative. It follows that the human soul has no gulf set between it and what we call nature. It is only the highest, that is to say the most active and the most representative, of all monads. It stands, indeed, at the head of the scale, but not outside it. From the monad which reveals its presence in that stone which with blinded eyes we call dead, through that which acts in the plant, in the animal, up to that of man, there is no chasm, no interruption. Nay, man himself is but one link in the chain of spiritual beings which ends only in God. All monads are souls; the soul of man is a monad which represents the universe more distinctly and adequately. The law which is enfolded in the lower monads is developed in it and forms a part of its conscious activity. The universe, which is confusedly mirrored by the perception of the lower monad, is clearly brought out in the conscious apperception of man. The stone is representative of the whole world. An all-knowing intelligence might read in it relations to every other fact the world, might see exemplified the past history of the world, and prefigured the events to come. For the stone is not an isolated existence, it is an