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ave to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning; when we successfully infer the future, we do so by means of principles which are not logically necessary, but are suggested by empirical data. And the concept of substance, upon which Spinoza relies, is one which neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept. But when we come to Spinoza’s ethics, we feel–or at least I feel-that something, though not everything, can be accepted even when the metaphysical foundation has been rejected. Broadly speaking, Spinoza is concerned to show how it is possible to live nobly even when we recognize the limits of human mbt shoes power. He himself, by his doctrine of necessity, makes these limits narrower than they are; but when they indubitably exist, Spinoza’s maxims are probably the best possible. Take, for instance, death: nothing that a man can do will make him immortal, and it is therefore futile to spend time in fears and lamentations over the fact that we must die. To be obsessed by the fear of death is a kind of slavery; Spinoza is right in saying that “the free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” But even in this case, it is only death in general that should be so treated; death of any particular disease should, if possible, be averted by submitting to medical care. What should, even in this case, be avoided, is a certain kind of anxiety or terror; the necessary measures should be taken calmly, and our thoughts should, as far as possible, be then directed to other matters. The same mbt footwear considerations apply to all other purely personal misfortunes. But how about misfortunes to mbt shoes online people whom you love? Let us think of some of the things that are likely to happen in our time to inhabitants of Europe or China. Suppose you are a Jew, and your family has been massacred. Suppose you are an underground worker against the Nazis, and your wife has been shot because you could not be caught. Suppose your husband, for some purely imaginary crime, has been sent to forced labour in the Arctic, and has died of cruelty and starvation. Suppose your daughter has been raped and then killed by enemy -578- soldiers. Ought you, in these circumstances, to preserve a philosophic calm? If you follow Christ’s teaching, you will say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I have known Quakers who could have said this sincerely and profoundly, and whom I admired because they could. But before giving admiration one must be very sure that the misfortune is felt as deeply as it should be. One cannot accept the attitude of some among the Stoics, who said, “What does it matter to me if my family suffer? I can still be virtuous.” The Christian principle, “Love your enemies,” is good, but the Stoic principle, “Be indifferent to your friends,” is bad. And the Christian principle does not inculcate calm, but an ardent love even towards the worst of men. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practise sincerely. The primitive reaction mbt clearance to such disasters is revenge. When Macduff learns that his wife and children have been killed by Macbeth, he resolves to kill the tyrant himself. This reaction is still admired by most people, when the injury is great, and such as to arouse moral horror in disinterested people. Nor can it be wholly condemned, for it is one of the forces generating punishment, and punishment is sometimes necessary. Moreover, from the point of view of mental health, the impulse to revenge is <a href="http://anfu.putianb2b.com/"><strong>安福QQ</strong></a> likely to be so strong that, if it is allowed no outlet, a man’s whole outlook on life may become distorted and more or less insane. This is not true universally, but it is true in a large percentage of cases. But on the other side it must be said that revenge is a very dangerous motive. In so far as society admits it, it allows a man to be the judge in his own case, which is exactly what the law tries to prevent. Moreover it is usually an excessive motive; it seeks to inflict more punishment than is desirable. Torture, for example, should not be punished by torture, but the man maddened by lust for vengeance will think a painless death too good for the object of his hate. Moreover–and it is here that Spinoza is in the right–a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom. Revenge as such is therefore not the best reaction to injury. Spinoza would say what the Christian says, and also something more. For him, all sin is due to ignorance; he would “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But he would have you avoid the limited purview from which, in his opinion, sin springs, and would -579- urge you, even under the greatest misfortunes, to avoid being shut up in the world mbt chapa of your sorrow; he would have you understand it by seeing it in relation to its causes and as a part of the whole order of nature. As we saw, he believes that hatred can be overcome by love: “Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love, passes into love; and love is thereupon greater, than if hatred had not preceded it.” I wish I could mbt kisumu believe this, but I cannot, except in exceptional cases where the person hating is completely in the power of the person who refuses to hate in return. <a href="http://anfu.putianb2b.com/"><strong>安福家*</strong></a> In such cases, surprise at being not punished may have a reforming effect. But so long as the wicked have power, it is not much use assuring them that you do not hate them, since they will attribute your words to the wrong motive. And you cannot deprive them of power by non-resistance. The problem mbt for Spinoza is easier than it is for one who has no belief in the ultimate goodness of the universe. Spinoza thinks that, if you see your Cheap mbts misfortunes as they are in reality, as part of the concatenation of causes stretching from the beginning of time to the end, you will see that they are only misfortunes to you, not to the universe, to which they are merely passing discords heightening an ultimate harmony. I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part. Nevertheless, when it is your lot to have to endure something that is (or seems to you) worse than the ordinary lot of mankind, Spinoza’s principle of thinking about the whole, or at any rate about larger matters than your own grief, is a useful one. There are even times when it is comforting to reflect that human life, with all that it contains of evil and suffering, is an infinitesimal part of the life of the universe. Such reflections may not suffice to constitute a religion, but in a painful world they are a help towards sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of utter despair. -580- CHAPTER XI Leibniz LEIBNIZ ( 1646-1716) was one of the supreme intellects of all time, but as a human being he was not admirable. He mbt clearance had, it is true, the virtues that one would wish to find mentioned in a testimonial to a prospective employee: he was industrious, frugal, temperate, and financially honest. But he was wholly destitute of those higher philosophic virtues that are so notable in Spinoza. His best thought was not such as would win him popularity, and he left his records of it unpublished in his desk. What he published was designed to win the approbation of princes and princesses. The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy which may be regarded as representing Leibniz: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow; the other, which has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical. It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds (to which F. H. Bradley added the sardonic comment “and everything in it is a necessary evil”); it was this Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of far greater philosophical importance. Leibniz was born two years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, at Leipzig, where his father was professor of moral philosophy. At the university he studied law, and in mbt shoes australia 1666 he obtained a Doctor’s degree at Altdorf, where he was offered a professorship, which he refused, saying he had “very different things in view.” In 1667 he entered the service of the archbishop of Mainz, who, like other West German princes, was oppressed by fear of Louis XIV. With the approval of the archbishop, Leibniz tried to persuade the French king to invade Egypt rather than Germany, but was met with a polite reminder that since the time of Saint Louis the holy war against the -581- infidel had gone out of fashion. His project remained unknown to the public until it was discovered by Napoleon when he occupied Hanover in 1803, four years after his own abortive Egyptian expedition. In 1672, in connection with this scheme, Leibniz went to Paris, where he spent the greater part of the next four years. His contacts in Paris were of great importance for his intellectual development, for Paris at that time led the world both in philosophy and in mbt uk mathematics. It was there, in 1675-6, that he invented the infinitesimal calculus, in ignorance of Newton’s previous but unpublished work on the same subject. Leibniz’s work was first published in 1684, Newton’s in 1687. The consequent dispute as to priority was unfortunate, and discreditable to all parties. Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called a ” mbt anti shoe wedding present,” consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband. History does not cheap mbt shoes record whether the brides were grateful. In Germany Leibniz had been taught a neo-scholastic Aristotelian philosophy, of which he retained something throughout his later life. But in Paris he came to know Cartesianism and the materialism of Gassendi, both of which influenced him; at this time, he said, he abandoned the “trivial schools,” meaning scholasticism. In Paris he came to know Malebranche and Arnauld the Jansenist. The last important influence on his philosophy was that of Spinoza, whom he visited in 1676. He spent a month in frequent discussions with him, and secured part of the Ethics in manuscript. In later years he joined in decrying Spinoza, and minimized his contacts with him, saying he had met him once, and Spinoza had told some good anecdotes about politics. His connection with the House of Hanover, in whose service he remained for the rest of his life, began in 1673. From 1680 onwards he was their librarian at Wolfenb眉ttel, and was officially employed in writing the history of Brunswick. He had reached the year 1005 when he died. The work was not published till 1843. Some of his time was spent on a project for the reunion of the Churches, but this proved abortive. He travelled to Italy to obtain evidence that the Dukes of Brunswick were connected with the Este family. But in spite of these services he was left behind at Hanover when George I became king of England, the chief reason being that his quarrel with Newton had -582- made England unfriendly to him. However, the Princess of Wales, as he told all his correspondents, sided with him against Newton. In spite of her favour, he died neglected. Leibniz’s popular philosophy may be found in the Monadology and the Principles of Nature and of Grace, one of which (it is uncertain which) he wrote for Prince Eugene of Savoy, Marlborough’ mbt sale s colleague. The basis of his theological optimism is set forth in the Th茅odic茅e, which he wrote for Queen Charlotte of Prussia. I shall begin with the philosophy expounded in these writings, and then proceed to his more solid work which he left unpublished. Like Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz based his philosophy on the notion of substance, but he differed radically from them as regards the relation of mind and matter, and as regards the number of substances. Descartes allowed three substances, God and mind and matter; Spinoza admitted God alone. For Descartes, <a href="http://www.putianb2b.com/"><strong>莆田贸易网址</strong></a> extension is the essence of matter; for Spinoza, both extension and thought are attributes of God. Leibniz held that extension cannot be an attribute of a substance. His reason was that extension involves plurality, and can therefore only belong to an aggregate of substances; each single substance must be unextended. He believed, consequently, in an infinite number of substances, which he called “monads.” Each of these would have some of the properties of a physical point, but only when viewed abstractly; in fact, each monad is a soul. This follows naturally from the rejection of extension as an attribute of substance; the only remaining possible essential attribute seemed to be thought. Thus Leibniz was led to deny the reality of matter, and to substitute an infinite family of souls. The doctrine that substances cannot interact, which had been developed by Descartes’s followers, was retained by Leibniz, and led to curious consequences. No two monads, he held, can ever have any causal relation to each other; when it seems as if they had, appearances are deceptive. Monads, as he expressed it, are “windowless.” This led to two difficulties: one in dynamics, where bodies seem to affect each other, especially in impact; the other in relation to perception, which seems to be an effect of the perceived object upon the mbt sneakers percipient. We will ignore the dynamical difficulty for the present, and consider only the question of perception. Leibniz held that every monad mirrors the universe, not because the universe affects it, but because God has given it a nature which spontaneously produces this result. There is a “pre- -583- etablished harmony” between the changes in one monad and those in another, which produces the semblance of mbt footwear interaction. This is obviously an extension of the two clocks, which strike at mbt shoes online the same moment because each keeps perfect time. Leibniz has an infinite number of clocks, all arranged by the Creator to strike at the same instant, not because they affect each other, but because each is a perfectly accurate mechanism. To those who thought the pre-established harmony odd, Leibniz pointed out what admirable evidence it afforded of the existence of God. Monads form a hierarchy, in which some are superior to others in the clearness and distinctness with which they mirror the universe. In all there is some degree of confusion in perception, but the amount of confusion varies according to the dignity of the monad concerned. A human body is entirely composed of monads, each of which is a soul, and each of which is immortal, but there is one dominant monad which is what is called the soul of the man of whose body it forms part. This monad is dominant, not only in the sense of having clearer perceptions than the others, but also in another sense. The changes in a human body (in ordinary circumstances) happen for the sake of the dominant monad: when my arm moves, the purpose served by the movement is in the mbts outlet dominant monad, i.e., my mind, not in the monads that compose my arm. This is the truth of what appears to common sense as the control of my will over my arm. Space, as it appears to the senses, and as it is assumed in physics, is not real, but it has a real counterpart, namely the arrangement of the monads in a three-dimensional order according to the point of view from which they mirror the world. Each monad sees the world in a certain perspective peculiar to itself; in this sense we can speak, somewhat loosely, of the monad as having a spatial position. Allowing ourselves this way of speaking, we can say that there is no such thing as a <a href="http://mcd.imnext.cn/blog/blog.php?do=showone&uid=2066&type=blog&itemid=3764 13"><strong>Cheap Prada Shoes With Genuine Patent Leather | Snipsly</strong></a> vacuum; every possible point of view is filled by one actual monad, and by only one. No two monads are exactly alike; this is Leibniz’s principle of the “identity of indiscernibles.” In contrasting himself with Spinoza, Leibniz made much of the free will allowed in his system. He had a “principle of sufficient reason,” according to which nothing happens without a reason; but when we are concerned with free agents, the reasons for their actions “incline without necessitating.” What a human being does always has a motive, -584- but the sufficient reason of his action has no logical necessity. So, at least, Leibniz says when he is writing popularly, but, as we shall see, he had another doctrine which he kept to himself after finding that Arnauld thought it shocking. God’s actions have the same kind of freedom. He always
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