588 GOTTFRIEDLEIBNIZ
of them praiseworthy for their sanctity, had some knowledge of what we have just said.
This is what led them to introduce and uphold the substantial forms so much in dis-
favour today. But they are neither so far from the truth nor as ridiculous as the common
run of our modern philosophers imagine.
I agree that the knowledge of forms is of no use in the details of physics and
should not be used for explaining the particulars of phenomena. That is where our
scholastics went wrong, and with them the physicians of the past who followed their
example, in thinking to account for the properties of bodies by mentioning forms and
qualities without taking the trouble to examine their manner of operation. It is as if we
were to content ourselves with saying that a clock has the horodictic [time-telling]
quality deriving from its form without considering what that consists in. That indeed
might be enough for whoever buys the clock, provided he left its maintenance to some-
one else.
But this shortcoming and misuse of forms should not make us reject something
whose knowledge is so necessary in metaphysics that without it, I hold, the first princi-
ples cannot be well understood, nor the mind sufficiently raised to the knowledge of
incorporeal natures and the wonders of God.
Nevertheless, a geometer has no need to trouble his mind with the famous
labyrinth of the composition of the continuum, and neither has any moral philosopher,
and still less any legal expert or politician, any need to trouble himself with the great
difficulties involved in reconciling the freedom of the will with the providence of God.
For the geometer can complete all his demonstrations and the politician conclude all his
deliberations without entering into these discussions, important as they are in philoso-
phy and theology. In the same way, a physicist can account for experiments, sometimes
by means of simpler experiments carried out before, and sometimes by means of geo-
metrical and mechanical demonstrations, without the need of forms and other general
considerations belonging to another sphere. If he employs the extraordinary concur-
rence of God, or some soul,archéor other thing of that nature, he is wandering as far off
course as he who tries to introduce the nature of destiny and our liberty into a delibera-
tion about an important practical matter. Men often make this mistake without thinking
when they trouble their minds by considering fate, and sometimes they are even
diverted from some good resolution or necessary care as a result.
- THEMEDITATIONS OF THETHEOLOGIANS ANDPHILOSOPHERS
CALLED“SCHOLASTICS” ARENOT TOBEDESPISEDENTIRELY
I know that in claiming in some way to rehabilitate the old philosophy and restore the
all but banished substantial forms to which not enough justice has been done to life, I
am proposing a big paradox. But I only do this on the supposition that it is possible to
speak of bodies as substances. But perhaps I shall not be lightly condemned if it is
known that I have long meditated on modern philosophy, and spent much time on phys-
ical experiments and geometrical demonstrations, and that I was long persuaded of the
vanity of such beings. But I was eventually obliged to take them up again against my
will and as if by force. It was as a result of carrying out my own researches that I was
made to recognise that our moderns do not do full justice to St. Thomas and other great
men of those times, and that the opinions of scholastic philosophers and theologians are
much more sound than is imagined, as long as they are used appropriately and in their
place. I am even convinced that if some exact and reflecting mind took the trouble to