Leibniz and the origin of things

LEIBNIZ AND THE ORIGIN OF THINGS © George MacDonald Ross, 1993 M. Dascal & E. Yakira (eds), Leibniz and Adam (Tel Aviv, University Publishing Projects Ltd, 1993), 241–257. Introduction The story of Adam is part of the story of creation, or of the origin of things in general. In this paper I shall mainly be concerned with Leibniz’s philosophical account of how the universe as a whole came into being; but I shall end with some remarks on the exceptional status of Adam and humankind. But what is a ‘philosophical’ account of creation? Philosophy is squeezed between religion on the one side, and science on the other. In many cultures, the story of how the universe came into being has been the prerogative of priests and theologians; and philosophical and scientific accounts have been tolerated only in so far as they conform to the religious story. A conventional view of the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece is that it began with the replacement of religious creation myths by cosmological speculation — when the sexual and military exploits of Gods and heroes were replaced, first by sympathies and antipathies between a limited number of material elements, and then by the wholly non-anthropomorphic materialism of Democritus, or by the anti-materialism of Pythagoras and others. But even in relatively liberal Greece, philosophers were frequently attacked and even prosecuted for impiety. The intellectual atmosphere in seventeenth-century Europe was similar in that philosophers once more indulged in cosmological speculation in a way which owed nothing to religious myth, and they were also liable to persecution for doing so. Nevertheless, conflict was partially defused by the lack of any sharp discontinuity between religion, theology, philosophy, and science. While there were those who took the Biblical account of creation literally, there was a long tradition of rational theology, in which religious stories were treated as myths which were literally false, but true at a deeper level. There was a substantial overlap between theology and metaphysics as intellectual disciplines. Rational theology was as much the province of the metaphysician as of the theologian — indeed, on one definition, deriving from Aristotle, metaphysics was theology (MacDonald Ross 1988). The distinction between the two disciplines was primarily institutional and contextual: they were taught by different people in different faculties using largely different texts; and while theology was a propaedeutic to religious practice, metaphysics was a propaedeutic to physics and the other subjects studied in the faculty of Philosophy or Arts. Although theology was the ‘superior’ faculty in the universities, it is a striking feature of the intellectual life of Christian Europe, as contrasted with other religious cultures, how little a theological education depended on the study of the holy book of Christianity, and how much on the works of the pagan Aristotle. Again, natural science was only beginning to emerge as an enterprise sharply distinct from metaphysics during the seventeenth century. There was no sharp line of demarcation between the territory of the metaphysician and that of the scientist, any more than there was between that of the metaphysician and the theologian. The term ‘philosophy’ covered all three, and the philosopher could move easily between general issues concerning God, substance, causation, space, time, etc., and more specific scientific theorising. Although it became increasingly unacceptable to summon a deus ex machina to explain particular phenomena, it was still universally taken for granted that the world had been created by God, and that the laws of nature were God’s laws. At the more general and metaphysical end of the spectrum, science gradually merged with theology. It should be noted that the God of the philosophers had little in common with the God of practical religion. However, people were used to the idea that natural theology might provide a minimalist concept of God, the details of whose nature would be filled in by revealed religion. While certain philosophers were castigated as atheists, it was not because they denied the existence of God, but because they denied various tenets considered essential to the truth of revealed religion. For example, both Hobbes and Spinoza were regularly described as atheists, despite the fact that Spinoza’s philosophy has God at its very centre, and that Hobbes’s Leviathan promotes a specifically Christian commonwealth, and probably contains more Biblical references than the whole of the Leibnizian corpus. Their fault was to deny tenets of revealed religion, such as the immateriality of God and the soul, and the freedom of the will. In early modern Europe, the philosopher bridged the gap between theology and empirical science. During the twentieth century, Western philosophers have retreated into a much more narrowly defined academic discipline, and have left it to scientists to indulge in metaphysical theorising about cosmological questions. One consequence of this is that professional philosophers have tended to pay relatively little attention to the cosmology of seventeenth century philosophers, on the grounds that it is not really philosophy, but a mixture of scientific speculation and theology. In my view, historians of philosophy should not limit the scope of their investigations to the narrow confines of the discipline as practised in their own age, but should place their subjects’ doctrines firmly within the wider contemporary context. Leibniz and Biblical Interpretation To turn to Leibniz, one of the most striking features of his account of creation is his virtually complete silence as to how it was to be reconciled with the story in the Bible. Leibniz’s general position on conflicts between reason or experience on the one hand, and revelation and the authority of scripture on the other, was cautious. In his relatively early notes on St. Augustine’s De trinitate (Grua 31–32), he accepted that the word of God was true, and that its meaning should not be distorted in order to accommodate it to human reasoning; but where the literal meaning contradicted what was evident to reason, a metaphorical interpretation should be preferred, provided it did not do violence to the text. Later in life, in the Théodicée, Discours préliminaire, §21, and the Nouveaux essais, IV xviii 9, he qualified this by saying that metaphorical interpretations might be acceptable as long as they did not contradict ‘indispensable’ truths — i.e. truths indispensable to religion. But he declined to say where the line should be drawn, on the grounds that it was not a question of logic, but of the ‘art of interpretation’, the rules of which were not yet sufficiently agreed. Nevertheless there is one piece of evidence — admittedly highly ambiguous — that Leibniz was prepared to go a long way in the direction of metaphorical interpretation of the Bible, and of the creation story in particular. This comes from a work attributed to Leibniz’s friend, F.M. van Helmont, called Cogitationes super quatuor priora capita . . . Genesis. Anne Becco (Becco 1978: 119–141) has argued, convincingly in my view, that the work was written by Leibniz on van Helmont’s behalf, since the latter was a bad writer at the best of times, and was ignorant of Latin. It contains a blend of van Helmont’s theories (toned down somewhat by Leibniz), and some of Leibniz’s own; and it consists largely of a word-by-word mystical and cabalistic interpretation of the first four books of Genesis. Although we cannot completely disengage its Leibnizian from its Helmontian components, it is hard to credit that Leibniz would have had anything to do with such an enterprise, however anonymously, unless he believed that it was legitimate to treat the creation story as myth — that is, as being literally false, but conveying a deeper truth to the initiated. For example, the comments on the first three words (in principio creavit), state that the story is only about the creation of the visible world, and that the spiritual world (to be equated with the Logos of St. John’s Gospel) co-existed with God in Elohim; and the creation of the visible world was not a creation ex nihilo, but out of a pre-existing, but non-material Chaos. As I shall argue, there is nothing particularly un-Leibnizian about these statements; but they go far beyond the literal meaning of In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Apart from this ambiguous document and a few casual allusions (some of which will be mentioned below), Leibniz generally ignores the Biblical story of creation, and expounds his views on creation without explicit reference to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. However, to talk of him ‘expounding’ his views is an oversimplification, since there is no single locus classicus which we can point to as providing a unified Leibnizian theory of creation. Rather, there are many disparate passages in which Leibniz makes remarks about the nature of the act of creation and what it was that he created, but it is left to the reader to knit them together into a consistent whole, in so far as this is possible. In what follows, I shall distinguish between two types of cosmological issue which are logically independent of each other. The first is the metaphysical question of the nature of the creative act itself; the second is the more scientific question of how the universe evolved from its initial to its present state. The Act of Creation The first Leibnizian account of the act of creation which I shall consider is the one which features most prominently in expositions of Leibniz’s philosophy, and which occurs most frequently in Leibniz’s own writings — for example it is the dominant picture in the Discours de métaphysique, the correspondence with Arnauld, and the Theodicée. According to this story, there was a time before time began, when God went through a process of contemplating all possible universes. In his infinite wisdom, he judged that one of these universes was the best possible, and that it would be better for it to exist rather than not to exist. Out of his infinite goodness, he then willed that it should exist. The act of creation consisted in adding existence to the essences in his mind. This story seems very unlike the story in Genesis, in that it has nothing to say about separating light from darkness, water from earth, and so on. Nevertheless it has certain important features in common: God existed alone before his creative act; a simple speech-act translated thought into reality: Dixit Deus . . . et factum est ita (though Leibniz dispenses with the speech-act — Dieu . . . produit [les substances créés] continuellement par une maniere d’emanation, come nous produisons nos pensées: Discours §14, GP IV 439); and what he created he saw as good (Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum). What matters is that Leibniz follows the Bible in treating God like a person, who thinks, wills and acts in time, despite the incoherence of the idea of temporal processes taking place in the mind of an eternal being, and the problem of what it is to add existence to a concept. Remarkably, in the Discours §2 (GP IV 427), Leibniz criticises the Biblical account for anthropomorphism (or anthropologie, as he calls it) — not for treating God as a person, but merely for portraying him as observing that what he had created was good after the act of creation. A second Leibnizian story depersonalises God, and marginalises his Reason and Will, especially the latter. It is prominent in writings such as the De rerum originatione radicali of 1697 (GP VII 302–308), and an untitled and undated paper (GP VII 289–291). On this account, there is a struggle for existence among possible worlds in the mind of God. Each possible world has an exigentia existendi, or drive towards existence, in proportion to its degree of perfection; and the most perfect wins the struggle for existence. Here the role of God is confined to that of providing a substratum for possible worlds to inhere in; and the struggle is to be understood in a logical rather than a temporal sense — there is no time before the beginning of time during which the struggle is enacted. Given that by ‘perfect’ Leibniz means ‘containing the highest degree of reality’ , we have a sort of ontological argument for the existence of the universe: the possible universe with the highest degree of reality inevitably is the actual universe, and the problem of the nature of real existence as something distinct from the being of a concept in the mind of God is by-passed (G. MacDonald Ross 1991). God’s creative will is left out of account; and the possible worlds, as concepts, could well be the immaterial Chaos or Logos out of which the material world is generated in van Helmont’s book. A third version emphasises the continuing dependence of the created universe on God. Thus in the Monadologie §47 (GP VI 614), Leibniz describes monads as being produced by continual fulgurations of the Divinity from moment to moment. Even without any reference to fulgurations or emanations, Leibniz’s writings are peppered with descriptions of creation as a continual process. On this view there is no room for any special initial act of creation, setting up the universe as a separate and relatively independent entity. It fits well with Leibniz’s version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, which assumes that the history of the created universe goes back in time to infinity, and that this is why there must be an eternal and necessary being which is its permanent ground (e.g. Monadologie, §§37–38: GP VI 613). The metaphor of light, and the source on which it is permanently dependent, has a strongly Neoplatonic flavour. Indeed, Leibniz himself recognises this, when in the Discours §28 (GP IV 453), he quotes John 1.9: God is the sun and the light of souls, ‘the light which lighteth every man that cometh into this world.’ Dieu est le soleil et la lumiere des ames, lumen illuminans omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum. He then comments approvingly that this is a Platonic doctrine, characteristic of Holy Scripture and the Fathers, rather than of the subsequent Aristotelian tendencies of mediaeval theology. The fourth version is more Pythagorean than Platonic. It is first found in the De organo sive arte magna cogitandi of about 1679 (C 429–432); but it seems to have dropped out of sight until a whole series of writings on binary arithmetic, beginning with the Mira numerorum omnium expressio per 1 et 0 of 1696 (Zacher 1973: 225–228). Here Leibniz equates God or being with the unit of binary arithmetic, and nothingness or pure matter with zero. The created universe consists in a set of binary numbers, which include zeros as well as units, i.e. which fall short of divine perfection through the admixture of not-being with pure being. Admittedly Leibniz described this as only an image of creation, which may suggest that it should not be taken literally. However, he was proud enough of the idea to make sketches for a medallion celebrating it (see below), and there are quite separate contexts where he hails Pythagoras as the greatest of the ancient philosophers (G. MacDonald Ross 1981), and others where he claims that the essences of things are like numbers (essentiae rerum sunt sicut numeri — cf. Disputatio metaphysica de principio individui, 1663, GP IV 26; Mira numerorum omnium expressio per 1 et 0, 1696, Zacher 1973: 228, 229). If we take these claims seriously, his project for a Universal Characteristic acquires a new significance. Everyone knows that Leibniz attempted to produce a system of notation whereby concepts would be given a complex number, enabling logical relationships to be calculated mathematically. But if he believed that essences or concepts are numbers, then he must also have believed that there was a single correct notation which would exactly and completely encapsulate the essences of things. In other words, he was a sort of Pythagorean Cabalist: he believed that one can fully understand the essences of things through knowing their real names; but the language of their names is not an idealised Hebrew, as people such as his friend F.M. van Helmont held, but the language of arithmetic, as Pythagoras had held — only it was not the decimal arithmetic of Pythagoras, but binary arithmetic. The Symbolism of the Medallion Some scholars (e.g. Zacher 1973: 34–55; Aiton 1985: 206–207) have claimed that the symbolism of Leibniz’s projected medallion celebrating the discovery of binary arithmetic as an image of creation specifically represents the Biblical account of creation. The position is complicated by the fact that there are three different sketches for the medallion in Leibniz’s own hand (LBr F15 Bl 16v, 24r, 25r), and the various published versions are not always accurate copies of the originals. 16v 24r 25r Zacher offers no evidence for his claim that the imagery is Biblical. Aiton (Aiton 1985: 206) says: The reverse side of the medal shows a picture of darkness over the water, with light streaming from the top; this illustrates the creation story. The version he refers to was originally published by Ludovici (1737: I.412), and is virtually identical to the medal minted by the Stadtsparkasse Hannover in 1981, in association with the Leibniz-Gesellschaft. The closest of Leibniz’s sketches is 16v; but both Ludovici and the Stadtsparkasse replace the motto unum pro cunctis praetereaque nihil by omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum, taking as their authority Leibniz’s letter to Herzog Rudolf August of 7/17 January 1697 (Anon. 1981: 1). Aiton’s description is wrong, since there is no depiction of darkness, and what he describes as water is clearly earth or unformed matter. The ‘light streaming from the top’ is not light in any physical sense, but God and his fulgurations, as is evidenced by the version in 25r, where the sun, moon, and stars are depicted above the Earth in addition to the light from the top. This feature is reproduced in the versions printed by Zacher 1973:52 and Müller 1969: 145, based on Wideburg 1718 — though in other respects they diverge from Leibniz’s own sketches. The version reproduced on the cover of Hochstetter 1966, where the source of the superior light is a triangle representing the Trinity, introduces a Christian dimension which is absent from Leibniz’s sketches. It could be argued that 25r provides at least minimal imagery of the Biblical creation story in that it represents the heavens and the Earth, as distinct from God (=1) at the top, and nothingness represented by a series of noughts at the bottom. On the other hand, there is nothing specifically Biblical about the idea that the universe consists of the heavens and the Earth. More interestingly, the different sketches reveal an ambiguity as to whether 0 represents unformed matter, or a void or chaos which is somehow prior to matter — an ambiguity which recurs in Leibniz’s verbal accounts of the image of creation (0 is matter in GM VII 239, but the void in Zacher 1973: 285 — both quoted below). However, the ambiguity is resolved if it is borne in mind that for Leibniz, as for other philosophers in the Neoplatonic tradition, unformed matter is in itself purely negative, and indistinguishable from nothingness, the void, or chaos. In so far as it is capable of being represented by a visual image (e.g. as a mass of rock), it has already taken on some form, even if of the lowest conceivable order, and it is no longer purely negative. The symbolism of God as one is problematic in a different way. In the Neoplatonic tradition, in which God is identified with ens, unum, et bonum (Being, the One, and the Good), much can be made of the significance of the number one. In Leibniz’s very first mention of the image of creation, he introduces it with the following words (C 430): It could be that there is only one thing which is conceived through itself, namely God himself, apart from which there is only nothingness or absence of being. This is illuminated by a marvellous simile . . . . Fieri potest, ut non nisi unicum sit quod per se concipitur, nimirum DEUS ipse, et praeterea nihilum seu privatio, quod admirabili similitudine declaratur. . . . In other words, the number 1, as the entirely self-contained source of all other numbers, represents God, as the necessary being which is the source of the contingent universe. However, in orthodox Christian theology, the unity of God is compromised by the doctrine of the Trinity. One would expect a Christian philosopher with a leaning towards number mysticism to make at least some attempt to bring the number three into the picture. For example, Leibniz could have pointed out that, after the number one, the next number which contains no noughts in binary notation is 3 (11 in binary) — but he does not do so. The only numerological reference to the Trinity that I can find is in an incidental comment to Bouvet (Zacher 1973: 285, quoted below), where he implies that the mystical number 7 (111 in binary) representing the sabbath ‘has a relationship with the Trinity’ , in that it consists of three 1s and no 0s. There is, however, one way in which Leibniz does seem to relate the idea of God as 1 and as a necessary being to the Bible — but to a New Testament text rather than to Genesis. At the head of his Wunderbarer Ursprung aller Zahlen aus 1 und 0 (Zacher 1973: 229), he puts three quotations, including unum necessarium; and again the medallion sketch in 25r has the phrase unum autem necessarium (Zacher 1973: 52). This may be a reference to Luke 10.41–42, where Jesus says to Martha: Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things; But one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. Martha, Martha, sollicita es, et turbaris erga plurima. Porro unum est necessarium. Maria optimam partem elegit, quae non auferetur ab ea. If so, this is a remarkable example of Leibniz reading deep metaphysical significance into a text which manifestly has a more natural, literal interpretation. Jesus is rebuking Martha for getting her domestic priorities wrong, rather than informing her of an identity between the number one and the necessary being. At the same time as Leibniz was designing the medallion, he also produced three sketches for seals symbolising the analogy between binary arithmetic and the creation (Zacher 1973: 236). These are much more abstract, and the most complicated of the three consists of the Greek letter phi (representing the combination of 1 and 0, and perhaps also Philosophy) inscribed within a triangle (representing God or the Trinity), inscribed within a circle (representing the universe), with the inscription Unus ex nihilo omnia bene fecit (‘The One made everything well out of nothing’ ). Leibniz referred to the seals in a letter to Grimaldi of 20.12.1696 (Zacher 1973: 36): He [Herzog Rudolph Augustus] was at first amazed; then when he understood better, he was so taken with it that he even ordered the mystical phi to be inscribed on seals as a symbol of all things having been created out of nothing through unity . . . Mirabatur is primum, mox ubi accuratius intellexit tantam inde cepit voluptatem, ut etiam sigillis iusserit insculpi mysticum phi velut symbolum rerum omnium ex nihilo creatarum per unitatem . . . In short, neither the sketches for the medallion nor the sketches for the seals give any grounds for supposing that Leibniz saw the binary analogy as having any relevance to the specifically Biblical story of creation. The symbolism is much more reminiscent of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. This interpretation is supported by the various texts in which Leibniz explains the analogy, which are almost all abstract and metaphysical, containing no reference to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Typical is the following passage from a letter to Johann Schulenburg of 29.3.1698 (GM VII 239): And this is the origin of things from God and nothing, the positive and the negative, perfection and imperfection, value and limits, active and passive, form (i.e. entelechy, effort, energy) and matter, or mass which is essentially inactive except in so far as it manifests resistance. I have shed considerable light on this through the analogy of the origin of numbers from 0 and 1 which I discovered, and which is an extremely beautiful image of the perpetual creation of things out of nothing, in dependence on God. Atque haec est origo rerum ex Deo et nihilo, positivo et privato, perfectione et imperfectione, valore et limitibus, activo et passivo, forma (i.e. entelechia, nisu, vigore) et materia seu mole per se torpente, nisi quod resistentiam habet. Illustravi ista nonnihil origine numerorum ex 0 et 1 a me observata, quae pulcherrimum est Emblema perpetuae rerum creationis ex nihilo, dependentiae quae a Deo. One rare exception is a letter to Bouvet of 2.4.1703 (Zacher 1973: 285), in which Leibniz builds on some far-fetched comparisons Bouvet had made between Chinese and Christian cosmology in the context of the analogy between the I Ching and binary arithmetic: However, it seems that the 8 kou or eight linear figures, which are taken as fundamental by the Chinese, give grounds for believing that Fu-Hsi himself had the creation in mind, making everything come from One and Nothing, and that he had himself pursued the connection with the Genesis story. For 0 can signify the void which precedes the creation of the sky and the earth. Then there follow the seven days, of which each one indicates what existed and had already been made when that day began. At the beginning of the first day there existed 1, i.e. God. At the beginning of the second day there existed two things, the sky and the earth, which had been created during the first day. Finally, at the beginning of the seventh day, everything existed by then. This is why the last day is the most perfect and the sabbath, since everything is made and complete; and thus 7 is written as 111, without any 0. And it is only in this binary notation that the perfection of the traditionally sacred number seven is made evident. It is also worth noting that this notation has a relationship with the Trinity. . . Il semble cependant, que les 8 Coua ou huit figures lineaires, qui passent pour fondamentales chez les Chinois, pourroient faire croire, que FOHY même a eu en veue la creation, en faisant tout venir de l’un et du Neant, et qu’il a même poussé le rapport à l’Histoire de la Genese. Car le 0 peut signifier le vuide, qui precede la creation du ciel et de la terre, puis suivent les sept jours, dont chacun marque ce qui existoit et se trouvoit fait, quand ce jour commençoit. Au commencement du premier jour existoit 1, c’est à dire Dieu. Au commencement du second jour, le ciel et la terre, estant crées pendant le premier. Enfin au commencement du septième existoit dèja le tout; c’est pourquoy le dernier est le plus parfait et le sabbat, car tout s’y trouve fait et rempli, ainsi 7 s’ecrit par 111 sans 0. Et ce n’est que dans cette maniere d’ecrire par 0 et par 1, que se voit la perfection du septenaire qui passe pour sacré, où il est encor remarquable, que son caractere a du rapport à la Trinité. . . . However, although Leibniz is purporting to bring out the analogy between binary arithmetic and the Genesis story, he only mentions one stage in the process from the initial state (God and nothing) to the final state (the completed universe), namely the creation of the heavens and the Earth. Indeed, in the Bible this act precedes the work of six days, the first of which consists in the separation of light from darkness. Leibniz says absolutely nothing about how the work of each day relates to binary arithmetic. One might compare this silence to a point in Leibniz’s correspondence with des Bosses, when des Bosses challenges him to reconcile his claim that animal and human souls were created from the beginning of things with the assertion in Genesis that they were created on the fourth day (GP II 367). Leibniz refused to say definitely whether animal souls were not created until the fourth day (GP II 370); but he did offer a means whereby his monadology might be reconciled with the Genesis story: although no new matter was created after the first day, new entelechies could be said to come into being whenever God turned an inorganic mass into an organism (GP II 368). However, this concession, which totally contradicts everything that Leibniz says elsewhere about the creation of monads, needs to be interpreted in the context of Leibniz’s general relationship with des Bosses. Leibniz was trying to persuade him that his monadology provided a means for reconciling Catholicism and Protestantism. In order to do this he had already proposed the vinculum substantiale as an optional but otherwise functionless addition to his system, which would accommodate the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The suggestion that animal souls might have been created on the fourth day should be seen as a similar piece of insincere metaphysical diplomacy. The Consistency of Leibniz’s Accounts of Creation How far are the four accounts of creation mutually consistent? It is clear that the first account, according to which God contemplates all possible worlds and then wills the best into existence, stands out as presenting an anthropomorphic view of God and his creative act. It is the closest to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and through it Leibniz was able to enter into dialogue with other philosophers and theologians. For example, the distinction between God’s understanding and his will gave Leibniz some scope for accommodating the orthodox doctrine that God’s creative act was free, and that within the created universe, human beings, at least, had freedom of the will. Nevertheless, the type of freedom which Leibniz defends is so minimalist and so deviously argued for, that one gets the strong impression that his primary motive in putting it forward was to avoid alienating religious leaders by openly espousing a heretical determinism. The other three accounts can be seen as complementary to each other. The composite picture they give is this: God is pure being. The essences of individual things are binary numbers determined by admixtures of being and not-being, and they have a drive to existence in proportion to the amount of being they contain. The maximally real compossible set of essences is actualised in the form of emanations from God. There is no room for an initial free act of creation by a personal God, and the composite account of creation owes far more to Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism than to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Leibniz was essentially a pagan metaphysician, and his concessions to Christianity, whether sincere or not, detract from the coherence of his philosophical system. The Early Evolution of the Universe If we now turn to what Leibniz says about the evolution of the created universe, we find two entirely different approaches. One type of account is purely materialistic, and is to be found in works such as the Hypothesis physica nova of 1671 (GP IV 177–219), and the Protogaea (D II ii 201–240), which Leibniz worked at over many years, but did not finally complete until 1715 (Müller 1969: 253). Here Leibniz assumes that the universe was originally homogeneous, and that the variety of elements and then of living things gradually emerged as the result of motion. In the Hypothesis physica nova, he begins his story when the Sun and the Earth are already distinct spheres with aether between them. He supposes that the nature of the Earth is watery (half-way between air and earth), and that aether is forced into it by the action of the Sun’s rays; and he suggests that this is what is meant in Genesis when the spirit of the Lord breathed on the waters (GP IV 182–3); but this is the limit of his Biblical comparisons. In the Protogaea, the physical cosmology is conceptually much the same, except that he begins at the very earliest stage, at which heavenly bodies are formed out of uniform matter, and then our Sun acquires its planets. But he implicitly admits the looseness of the connection between his account and that in the Bible when he writes (§§2–3, D II ii 201–202): But heat or internal motion comes from fire, or light, that is, a highly rarefied permeating spirit. And thus we arrive at a cause of motion, which is where the Holy Scripture also takes up the beginning of cosmogony. So the earliest stage in the formation of things which can be reached by human knowledge, whether by reasoning or by the teaching and tradition of Holy Scripture, is the separation of light and darkness, that is, of active and passive beings; the second stage is the mutual separation of passive beings, that is, the segregation of liquids from dry things . . . . Calor autem motusve intestinus ab igne est, seu luce, id est tenuissimo spiritu permeante. Atque ita ad motricem caussam perventum est, unde Sacra quoque Historia Cosmogeniae initium capit. Quousque ergo pertingere hominum notitia potest sive ratiocinatione, sive Sacrarum Scripturarum propagatione et traditione, primus est formationis rerum gradus, separatio lucis et tenebrarum, id est agentium et patientium; secundus patientium inter se discriminatio, id est liquidorum discessio a siccis . . . . In short, throughout his life Leibniz believed it was possible to give a purely materialistic account of the early development of the universe, with only passing reference to the Bible, and none at all to his monadological metaphysics. The other type of account is monadological rather than materialistic. It is to be found in Leibniz’s writings of all periods, but is perhaps must fully expressed in the Monadologie §§64–77 (GP VI 618–620). According to this, the universe consists entirely of souls, and no soul is without a body, however small. Souls do not come in or out of existence: birth is a process whereby a soul becomes the dominant monad of a macroscopic body, and at death it retreats into microscopic one. If these accounts are to be consistent, it would seem to follow that when the Earth was a homogeneous sphere of water, this could be true only at the macroscopic level. At a sufficiently microscopic level it would be like the fish pond Leibniz refers to in the Monadologie §67 (GP VI 618), where he claims that each drop of water would itself be a tiny pond with fish in it. Leibniz certainly believed that for the world to be the best possible is not for it to be the best possible at any given time (Letter to Bourguet, 5.8.1715: GP III 582–3). Rather, its total history is the best possible, and part of its excellence consists in its continual and never-ending evolution towards better and better states. At the end of the De rerum originatione radicali (GP VII 308), he uses the metaphor of the extent to which the surface of the Earth has come under cultivation. Perhaps we can extend this metaphor, and say that at an early stage of evolution the whole of the surface of the Earth was uncultivated in the sense of manifesting no variety of inanimate or animate beings at the macroscopic level, even though it existed at the microscopic level. With evolution, the variety expanded outwards to embrace the macroscopic world as well. As it happens, in the De rerum originatione radicali, Leibniz stresses the scope for further improvement and ‘cultivation’ at the microscopic rather than at the macroscopic or even the astronomic level; but the essential point is the same: There is a ready answer to the possible objection that on my account the world which has already been created ought to be Paradise: even if many substances have already reached great perfection, nevertheless, on account of the divisibility of the continuum to infinity, there always remain in the depths of things dormant parts yet to be aroused and promoted to something greater and better, and in a word to a better state of cultivation. So there is never any arrival at the end of progress. There is a ready answer to the possible objection that, on my account, the world which has already been created ought to be Paradise: even if many substances have already reached great perfection, nevertheless, on account of the divisibility of the continuum to infinity, there always remain in the depths of things, dormant parts yet to be aroused and promoted to something greater and better, and in a word to a better state of cultivation. So there is never any arrival at the end of progress. Et quod objici posset: ita oportere ut Mundus dudum factus fuerit Paradisus, responsio praesto est: etsi multae jam substantiae ad magnam perfectionem pervenerint, ob divisibilitatem tamen continui in infinitum, semper in abysso rerum superesse partes sopitas adhuc excitandas et ad majus meliusque et ut verbo dicam, ad meliorem cultum provehendas. Nec proinde unquam ad Terminum progressus perveniri. The Creation of Adam Finally, I come to the question of the creation of Adam, or of the human soul. In one respect, Leibniz’s position is absolutely clear: the soul of Adam, as of every other human being, existed from all time, and possessed a body. Leibniz does not tell us explicitly what the body was like; but given the harmony between soul and body, and the lack of sudden discontinuities in nature, it would seem necessary that the body would be like a human body, only microscopically small — like contemporary representations of human spermatozoa or ‘spermatic animals’ (Monadologie §82, GP VI 621) as having a broadly human form. Similarly, although Leibniz avoided eschatological speculation, it would seem that at death the soul retreats back into a microscopic human body. Like Pythagoras, Leibniz believed in the soul’s pre- and post-existence in a different body — though unlike Pythagoras, he denied that the soul could inhabit a succession of different kinds of body. So far, this is all very unchristian. However, in many of his writings, e.g. the Monadologie §§82–90 (GP VI 621–623), and the Principes de la Nature et de la Grace §§14–18 (GP 604–606), in order to accommodate his account to religious orthodoxy, Leibniz distinguished between the substance of the soul, and its peculiarly human capacities and status. Only on acquiring a macroscopic body did the human soul become capable of reason, self-consciousness, and moral awareness. As such, it belonged not only to the Realm of Nature, but also to the Realm of Grace. Bringing a new human being into the world required not an act of creation, but a special, miraculous act of grace, which was outside and independent of the order of nature. As a result of this act of grace, human beings were capable of entering into a special relationship with God as subjects of his kingdom, and not merely as natural objects which he had created. But if we ask what happens to human souls after death, Leibniz would seem to have no obvious answer consistent both with his metaphysics and the Christian doctrine of the afterlife. There surely cannot be a Heaven distinct from the best possible world; and the passage from the De rerum originatione radicali quoted above (GP VII 308) clearly implies that Paradise is an infinitely postponed final state of the actual universe. Again, he says that the soul shrinks into a microscopic body on death, so that there is no scope for its relocation in an extra-terrestrial Heaven. Perhaps the answer is that the new body, being so insignificant in material terms, is like the body of an angel; and the soul, less encumbered by matter, is capable of higher levels of rationality and morality than before. Heaven is not outside the world, but within it; and along with everything else, it is continually improving. But why, in Leibniz’s system, should there be anything special about our present order of reality? Why should the immortal soul retreat back into the order of reality from whence it came, rather than advance to a super-world in which the planet Earth is but an atom? Leibniz was well aware of such speculations — for example, Johann Bernoulli wrote him a long letter on 8.11.1698 (GM III 545–549), describing how our world might be related to a super-world in the same way as microscopic worlds are related to ours. But Leibniz made no comment. It seems that he never found any way of reconciling his wholly relativistic theory of space, size, and time with the Christian view that there is something special about human beings in our particular place in the spatio-temporal continuum. Conclusion In conclusion, Leibniz’s metaphysics suggests an account of the creation of the universe and of human beings which belongs firmly to the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions of ancient Greek philosophy. He tried to modify it in order to make it more consistent with Christian orthodoxy — with how much sincerity, it is impossible to say. Although the Hanoverians nicknamed Leibniz Glaubenix, or ‘unbeliever’, on account of his lack of religious observation, there is no evidence of his perceiving any danger of persecution for his unorthodox theological positions (unlike Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes, for example). However, one of his main ambitions in life was the reunification of the Churches, and for this it was necessary for him to present his metaphysical system as providing the highest common factor of a universal but essentially Christian theology. Privately he may have believed in the adequacy of a broader monotheism, which would embrace all the great religious systems, including Judaism, Islam, Neoplatonism, and the Chinese theology he attributed to Fu-Hsi. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that he refers as little as possible to specifically Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity or the special nature of Jesus Christ — even his redemptive account of the Realm of Grace is completely silent about Jesus. In view of his pantheism, it is all the more surprising that he could not bring himself to convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism, in order to obtain coveted posts in Rome or Vienna; but perhaps this only shows that religious adherence is not simply a question of dogma, but also of social identity, involving deep personal loyalties. Leibniz and Adam? Leibniz’s attempt to present his philosophy as a basis on which Christianity could be reunited not only failed to achieve its purpose, but it weakened the force and coherence of his metaphysical system. He would have had a more consistent philosophy if he had not felt compelled to reconcile it with the Biblical story of the creation of the universe and of the first man. 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