This reminds me of a fine disquisition by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, which agrees perfectly with my opinion on this subject and seems to have been made expressly to oppose our too materialistic philosophers. This agreement has led me to a desire to translate it although it is a little long. Perhaps this example will give us an incentive to share in many of the other beautiful and well founded thoughts which are found in the writings of this famous author.
Leibniz forgot to supply the passage in his original script, so here it is:
[It is Socrates who speaks.] I once heard someone reading from a book that he said was by Anaxagoras, containing these words: ‘All things were caused by an intelligent being that set them out and embellished them.’ This pleased me greatly, for I believed that if the world was caused by an intelligence, everything would be made in the most perfect possible manner. That is why I believed that someone wanting to explain why things are produced, and why they perish or survive, should search for what would be most suitable to each thing’s perfection. So such a person would only have to consider, in ·the thing he was studying, whether· himself or in something else, what would be the best or most perfect. For someone who knew what was most perfect would also know what would be imperfect, for the knowledge of either is knowledge of the other. Considering all this, I rejoiced at having found an authority who could teach me the reasons for things: for example, whether the earth is spherical or flat, and why it is better that it should be one way rather than the other. I expected also that in the course of saying whether or not the earth is at the centre of the universe, he would explain to me why its position is the most suitable for it to have. And that he would tell me similar things about the sun, the moon, the stars, and their movements. And finally that after having told me what would be best for each thing in particular, he would show what would be best over-all. Filled with this hope, I lost no time in acquiring Anaxagoras’s books and whipping through them; but I found nothing like what I had been reckoning on: to my surprise, I found him making no use of ·the idea of· the governing intelligence that he had put forward, that he had nothing more to say about the embellishments and the perfection of things, and that he brought in an implausible ·notion of· ether. It’s as though someone were to say at the outset that Socrates acts with intelligence, and then move on to explaining the particular causes of Socrates’s actions thus: Socrates is seated here because he has a body composed of bone, flesh and sinews, the bones are solid but they are separated at joints, the sinews can be stretched or relaxed—all that is why the body is flexible, and, rounding out the explanation, why I am sitting here. Or as though someone, wanting to explain our present conversation, appealed to the air, and to the organs of speech and hearing and such things, forgetting the real causes, namely that the Athenians thought it better to condemn than to acquit me, and that I thought it better to remain here than to escape. If I had not had that thought—if I had not found it more just and honourable to suffer the penalty my country chooses to impose than to live as a vagabond in exile—I swear these sinews and bones would long ago have put themselves among the Boeotians and Megarans! That is why it unreasonable to call these bones and sinews causes. Someone might say that without bones and sinews I could not do what I do, and he would be right; but the true cause is different from a mere condition without which the cause could not be a cause. Some people offer as their whole explanation of what holds the earth in its place the movements of bodies surrounding it; they forget that divine power sets everything out in the most beautiful manner, and do not understand that the right and the beautiful join forces to form and maintain the world.