Great Throughts Treasury

"Therefore, I have attacked [the problem of the catenary] which I had hitherto not attempted, and with my key [the differential calculus] happily opened its secret."

"These gentlemen maintain, then, that space is a real absolute being; but this leads them into great difficulties. For it appears that this being must be eternal and infinite. This is why there have been some who believed that it was God Himself, or else His attribute, His immensity. But as it has parts, it is not a thing which can be appropriate to God."

"These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual agreement [conformité] of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe."

"Thus although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which is particularly affected by it."

"This miracle of analysis, this marvel of the world of ideas, an almost amphibian object between Being and Non-being that we call the imaginary number."

"This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God."

"They are either truths of reason or truths of fact. Truths of reason are necessary, those of fact are contingent."

"Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough."

"This means that it has throughout a degree of rigidity as well as of fluidity, and that there does not exist any body which is absolutely hard or absolutely fluid; that is to say that it is impossible to find in any body any atom whose hardness is indefeasible."

"Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced."

"Thus it may be said that a Monad can only come into being or come to an end all at once; that is to say, it can come into being only by creation and come to an end only by annihilation, while that which is compound comes into being or comes to an end by parts."

"Thus our body must be affected to some extent by the changes in all the others."

"Thus the fiction of a finite material universe, the whole of which moves about in an infinite empty space, cannot be admitted. It is altogether unreasonable and impractical. For besides the fact that there is no real space outside the material universe, such an action would be without purpose; it would be working without doing anything, agendo nihil agere. No change which could be observed by any one whatever would be occurring. Such things are the imaginings of philosophers with incomplete notions, who make of space an absolute reality."

"Thus the final reason of things must be in a necessary substance, in which the variety of particular changes exists only eminently, as in its source; and this substance we call God."

"Thus the sufficient reason, which needs no further reason, must be outside this series of contingent things, and must lie in a substance which is the cause of this series, or which is a being that bears the reason of its existence within itself; otherwise we should still not have a sufficient reason, with which we could stop. And this final reason is called God."

"Thus there will be two sorts of knowledge as there are two sorts of proofs, of which the one produces certainty, while the other arrives at probability only."

"To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love."

"Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connection of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way."

"TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. Thus the habit of loving someone is nothing other than BENEVOLENCE by which we want the good of others, not for the profit that we gain from it, but because it is agreeable to us in itself. CHARITY is a general benevolence. And JUSTICE is charity in accordance with wisdom... so that one does not do harm to someone without necessity, and that one does as much good as one can, but especially where it is best employed."

"To love means rejoice in foreign happiness."

"Two things are identical if one can be substituted for the other without affecting the truth."

"We are all merely empiricists as regards three-fourths of our actions. For example, when we expect it to be day tomorrow, we are behaving as empiricists, because until now it has always happened thus. The astronomer alone knows this by reason."

"We must then come down to either the mathematical points, out of which some authors compound extension, or to the atoms of Epicurus and M. Cordemoy (which are things that you and I alike reject ), or else we must acknowledge that no reality can be found in bodies; or finally we must recognize some substances as having genuine unity."

"We might get to know the beauty of the universe in each soul, if we could unfold all that is enfolded in it and that is perceptibly developed only through time. But as each distinct perception of the soul includes an infinite number of confused perceptions, which involve the whole universe, the soul itself knows the things of which it has perception, only in so far as it has distinct and heightened [or unveiled] perceptions of them; and it has perfection in proportion to its distinct perceptions. Each soul knows the infinite, knows all, but confusedly."

"We perceive things in three ways: through experience, through reasoning, and through a representation."

"We may say that we are immune from bondage in so far as we act with a distinct knowledge, but that we are the slaves of passion in so far as our perceptions are confused... In truth we will only that which pleases us: but unhappily what pleases us now is often a real evil, which would displease us if we had the eyes of understanding open."

"We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind."

"We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things."

"We rightly regard bodies as being things, for even phenomena are real. But if any one seeks to regard bodies as being substances he will surely need some new principle of real unity. The man in Ireland (Berkeley) who impugns the reality of bodies seems neither to give adequate reasons nor to explain sufficiently what is in his mind. I suspect that he is one of those people who seek to become famous by their paradoxes."

"What is is what must be."

"What is it to love? It is to be delighted by the happiness of another."

"Whatever renders us more capable of reflecting on more perfect objects and in a more perfect manner also makes us naturally perfect. But the present condition of our life forces us to have a great number of confused thoughts which do not make us naturally perfect. Such is the knowledge of customs, genealogies and languages, and indeed all historical knowledge of facts both civil and natural."

"When I tried to get to the bottom of the actual principles of mechanics in order to give an explanation of the laws of Nature which are known through experience, I became aware that the consideration of an extended mass is not of itself enough, and that use must also be made of the notion of force."

"Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited. And there, where there are no bounds, that is to say in God, perfection is absolutely infinite."

"When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached. It is this way that in mathematics speculative theorems and practical canons are reduced by analysis to definitions, axioms and postulates."

"Wisdom is the science of happiness or of the means of attaining the lasting contentment which consists in the continual achievement of a greater perfection or at least in variations of the same degree of perfection."

"With every lost hour, a part of life perishes."

"With regard to minds, that is to say substances which think, and are capable of knowing God and of discovering eternal truths, I hold that God governs them by laws different from those by which He governs the rest of substances."

"You say you do not see what leads me to admit that there are such substantial terms, or rather corporeal substances, endowed with a genuine unity. It is because I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity."