Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil by Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
page 49 of 554 (08%)
page 49 of 554 (08%)
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he wanted in order to get out of the labyrinth of a fatal necessity; and he
could give no reason for this new part of his system. It was inconsistent with the clearest notions of our minds: for it is evident that an atom which describes a straight line for the space of two days cannot turn away at the beginning of a third, unless it meets with some obstacle, or has a mind all of a sudden to go out of its road, or contains some spring which begins to play at that very moment. The first of these reasons cannot be admitted in a vacuum. The second is impossible, since an atom has not the faculty of thinking. And the third is likewise impossible in a corpuscle that is a perfect unity. I must make some use of all this. 'VI. Caesar's soul is a being to which unity belongs in a strict sense. The faculty of producing thoughts is a property of its nature (so M. Leibniz), which it has received from God, both as to possession and exercise. If the first thought it produces is a sense of pleasure, there is no reason why the second should not likewise be a sense of pleasure; for when the total cause of an effect remains the same, the effect cannot be altered. Now this soul, at the second moment of its existence, does not receive a new faculty of thinking; it only preserves the faculty it had at the first moment, and it is as independent of the concourse of any other cause at the second [43] moment as it was at the first. It must therefore produce again at the second moment the same thought it had produced just before. If it be objected that it ought to be in a state of change, and that it would not be in such a state, in the case that I have supposed; I answer that its change will be like the change of the atom; for an atom which continually moves in the same line acquires a new situation at every moment, but it is like the preceding situation. A soul may therefore continue in its state of change, if it does but produce a new thought like the preceding. 'But suppose it to be not confined within such narrow bounds; it must be |
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