Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/304

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282 LEIBNITZ. the parts thrown off. If it takes place quickly men call it birth or death. Actual death there is as little as there is an actual genesis; not the soul only, but every living thing is imperishable. Death is decrease and involution, birth increase and evolution. The dying creature loses only a portion of its bodily machine and so returns to the slum- berous or germinal condition of "involution," in which it existed before birth, and from which it was aroused through conception to development. Pre-existence as well as post- existence must be conceded both to animals and to men. Leuwenhoek's discovery of the spermatozoa furnished a welcome confirmation for this doctrine, that all individuals have existed since the beginning of the world, at least as preformed germs. The immortality of man, conformably to his superior dignity, differs from the continued existence of all monads, in that after his death he retains memory and the consciousness of his moral personality. 3. Man : Cognition and Volition. In reason man possesses reflection or self-conscious- ness as well as the knowledge of God, of the universal, and of the eternal truths or a priori knowledge, while the animal is limited in its perception to experience, and in its reasoning to the connection of perceptions in accordance with memory. Man differs from higher beings in that the majority of his ideas are confused. Under confused ideas Leibnitz includes both sense-perceptions — anyone who has distinct ideas alone, as God, has no sense- perceptions — and the feelings which mediate between the former and the perfectly distinct ideas of rational thought. The delight of music depends, in his opinion, on an uncon- scious numbering and measuring of the harmonic and rhythmic relations of tones, aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful in general, and even sensuous pleasure, on the confused perception of a perfection, order, or harmony. The application of the lex contimd to the inner life has a very wide range. The principal results are: (i) the mind always thinks; (2) every present idea postulates a previous one from which it has arisen ; (3) sensation and thought differ only in degree ; (4) in the order of time, the ideas of