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Encounters in Law and Philosophy
Stephen
CONNELLY
LEIBNIZ:
A CONTRIBUTION
TO THE
ARCHAEOLOGY
OF POWER
Leibniz:
A Contribution to
the Archaeology of Power
ENCOUNTERS IN LAW AND PHILOSOPHY
SERIES EDITORS: Thanos Zartaloudis and Anton Schütz
This series interrogates, historically and theoretically, the encounters

between philosophy and law. Each volume published takes a unique
approach and challenges traditional systemic approaches to law and
philosophy. The series is designed to expand the environment for law and
thought.
Titles available in the series
STASIS: Civil War as a Political Paradigm

Giorgio Agamben
On the Idea of Potency: Juridical and Theological Roots of the Western Cultural
Tradition
Emanuele Castrucci
Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal
Anton Schütz and Marinos Diamantides
The Birth of Nomos
Thanos Zartaloudis
Leibniz: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Power
Stephen Connelly
General Advisor
Giorgio Agamben
Advisory Board
Clemens Pornschlegel, Institut für Germanistik, Universität München,
Germany
Emmanuele Coccia, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France
Jessica Whyte, University of Western Sydney, School of Humanities and
Communication Arts, Australia
Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, New York, USA
Alain Pottage, Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK and Sciences Po,
Paris
Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts, Australia
Robert Young, NYU, English, USA
Nathan Moore, Birkbeck College, Law School, University of London, UK
Alexander Murray, English, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Piyel Haldar, Birkbeck College, Law School, University of London, UK
Anne Bottomley, Law School, University of Kent, UK
Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton, UK
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/enlp
LEIBNIZ:
A CONTRIBUTION
TO THE
ARCHAEOLOGY
OF POWER
Stephen Connelly
For Rose
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses

in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected
subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining
cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information
visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Stephen Connelly, 2021
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Palatino by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 1806 5 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 1808 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1809 6 (epub)
The right of Stephen Connelly to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
1. From Trinity to Mind: The Intensional Basis of
the Law 14
2. Potency and Supposita 61
3. Will: The Scholastic Heritage 88
4. Will, Power and Pretensionality 108
5. Ars Combinatoria as Urdoxa 148
6. A New Method of Teaching Law 195
7. Power and Obligation in the 1660s 228
8. Power and Obligation in the Elementa Iuris
Naturalis: The State Space 261
Conclusion 310
Bibliography 316
Index 329
Illustrations
Figures
Figure 5.1 L
eibniz’s ‘mobile’ used for explaining
concursus 179
Tables
Table 5.1 Leibniz’s combinatorial terminology 157
Table 5.2 Exponents and complexions 165
Table 5.3 Example of com4nation 167
Table 5.4 Leibniz’s Table ‫ב‬ 169
Table 5.5 Rearranged version of Leibniz’s Table ‫א‬ 170
Table 5.6 Disposition as combination 176
Table 5.7 Leibnizian group of actions 180
Table 5.8 Expanded Leibnizian group of actions 181
vi
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tara Mulqueen for our long chats on

the nature of association and community. Early versions
of Chapters 4 and 5 were presented at the Critical Legal
Conferences at the University of Sussex in 2014 and University
of Kent in 2016, and the comments and questions of Anton
Schütz and Donatella Alessandrini, among many others, at the
latter event were particularly appreciated. Groundwork on
the relationship between Leibniz and Neoplatonism was pre-
sented at the University of Wrocław (at the kind invitation of
Mirosław Sadowski) in 2016. Developed versions of Chapters 5
and 6 were presented at the Warwick Continental Philosophy
Conference and the EUTOPIA History of Ideas Conference
with Cergy-Pontoise, both in 2019. I would like to thank Céline
Roynier, Stuart Elden, Filip Niklas and Alex Underwood
for their questions and suggestions. Finally, the findings of
Chapters 7 and 8 were to be presented, at the kind invitation of
Maria Drakopoulou and Connal Parsley, at Kent Law School in
2020. Events, however, delayed this research seminar.
In preparing this text I had the assistance of several people,
including Fabienne Allegret-Maret, the extremely kind and
patient Thanos Zartaloudis, Iulia Nicolescu, Helen Riley,
Peter Hallward, Gil Leung, Illan Wall, Laura Williamson,
Raza Saeed, Marinos Diamantides, Ania Zbyszewska and
John Snape. I am particularly indebted to Anton Schütz for
his careful and patient review of the manuscript. I learnt
much from the process.
This book was partly written on study leave granted by the
University of Warwick School of Law. I must also thank the
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and the Universitätsbibliothek
at the Goethe Universität, both in Frankfurt am Main for
hosting me.
vii
Abbreviations
As readers of Leibniz are aware a critical edition of Leibniz’s

complete works has been in preparation for almost a century,
and so at present it continues to prove necessary to rely on
several partial editions of Leibniz’s works, some of which are
quite venerable and lack modern critical apparatus. In this
book I use the following abbreviations for commonly cited
editions. Other works used are cited in full, and can be found
referenced in the bibliography.
A: German Academy of Sciences (ed.) G.W. Leibniz: Sämtliche

Schriften and Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923–).
Reference are to series (Reihe) and volume (Band).
AG: Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical
Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)
C: Louis Couterat (ed.) Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz
(Paris: Alcan, 1903)
DM: Discourse on Metaphysics, in L: 303, by reference to para-
graph number.
Du: L.L. Dutens (ed.) G.G. Leibnitii Opera Omnia (Geneva:
1768)
Ger: Carl Gerhardt (ed.) Die Philosophischen Schriften von
Leibniz 7 vols (Berlin: Wedimann, 1875–90) reprinted
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1965)
GM: Carl Gerhardt (ed.) Leibnizens Mathemathische Schriften
7 vols (Berlin: A. Asher 1848–63) reprinted (Hildesheim:
Olms, 1962)
Gr: Gaston Grua (ed.) G.W. Leibniz: Textes inédits d’après des
manuscrits de la Bibliothèque provincial d’Hanovre 2 vols
(Paris: Vrin, 1948)
L: Leroy E. Loemker (ed.) G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers
and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969)
viii
Acknowledgements
M: André Robinet (ed.), Leibniz Monadology (Paris: PUF, 1954)
references are to the paragraph number.
NE: Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (eds), New Essays
on the Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996)
Ri: Patrick Riley (ed.) The Political Writings of Leibniz
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)
ix
Introduction
Activity and power

In his book, Creation and Anarchy, Georgio Agamben writes
that ‘it is . . . worth reflecting on the fundamental function
that modal verbs develop in our culture and in philosophy
in particular’.1 Agamben has in mind the modal verb ‘to be
able to’ which he links to Aristotelean conception of poten-
tial (dunamis), and its supersession, at the hands of medieval
theologians, by the modal ‘to will to’ (velle). This change of
emphasis can be situated within the broader transformation,
examined by the inspiring Gwenaëlle Aubry,2 of the senses of
activity (energeia) and particularly in-potency (dunamei) from
Aristotle, through Plotinus, to Aquinas and Duns Scotus. It is
a change which sees power evolve from being merely what
an active substance could possibly do (and might fail to do),
to a dominating force of creation or coercion which begins to
approach the modern, disciplinary sense of political power.
In this movement, Agamben argues,3 the modalities of possi-
bility, contingency, impossibility and necessity are constantly
rearticulated, and greater or lesser emphasis is given to one
term or other. Power and activity, the central terms of the
science of being, are inflected by modalities, just as the verb
‘to walk’ gains new meaning when we attach ‘to ought to’. ‘I
have the power to’ morphs into the modern ‘I must will the
power to’.4
The contribution of this work is to locate Leibniz within
that wider archaeology of power, and to show how the uni-
versal jurisprudence which Leibniz developed from the 1660s
into the 1690s can be considered as a transformative encoun-
ter with the concepts of activity, power and modality. Yet
Leibniz does not necessarily orient himself by reference to the
1
polestar of power; rather, his rearticulation of activity, power
and modality is motivated at least in part by the conflictual
relationships between Reformed and Scholastic theology,
between natural law and natural right, and between mecha-
nistic natural philosophy and human freedom. Any account
of Leibniz’s views on power must situate him in his context.
To guide this investigation: I pose the following overarch-
ing questions:
(a) How does Leibniz reconfigure the classical divide

between activity and power, in the context of natural
law?
(b) How does Leibniz deal with the problems for divine
justice posed by a materialist account of power (potentia)
proposed variously by Hobbes and Spinoza?
(c) How does Leibniz use modality to formulate his theory
of justice, and what consequences does this have for the
activity–power relationship?
The challenge Leibniz sets for any archaeology of power is that

ostensibly he swims against the tide: he appears to reinstate
the Aristotelean priority of activity over power, and to demote
power (potentia) to that cause which cannot be reduced to a
substantial form’s own volitional act. That is, potentia becomes
once again a mark of finitude. Yet it will be seen that it is
through modality that Leibniz affirms the primacy of power,
even if he eschews the nomenclature of potentia. To do this
Leibniz develops the notion of an internalised ‘state space’
which determines what is morally necessary and impossi-
ble, and this state space will structurally occupy the position
previously filled by potentia and dunamei in the metaphysical
systems of his predecessors. Leibniz will then use this con-
figuration to define obligation and right, and thereby link his
technical conception of power to the modality of the ought
to do. In this he opens the way to Kant’s notion of universal
imperative which, as Agamben notes, binds together modal-
ity and potency. What is necessary becomes what ought to
be willed, and what is right ranges across what is possible; a
possible whose conditions are determined by power.
In order to extract this complex movement from Leibniz’s
work it is necessary to explore the particular contexts and
2
Introduction
problems with which the German thinker engages. This is
methodologically justified not least because Leibniz’s move-
ment of the chess pieces of activity and power are subtle,
and can only be clarified, and in the case of potency, iden-
tified, when thrown into archaeological relief. Given the
sheer volume and richness of Leibniz’s work, it has proved
necessary to impose certain boundary conditions to achieve
this. Temporally, I have limited myself to Leibniz’s early and
middle periods (roughly 1663–79 and 1680–1700). The subject
matter is focused on, if necessarily not limited to, Leibniz’s
legal theory, and this determines also a focus within our time
period. Leibniz’s key jurisprudential works are developed
in the early period, and our recourse to the middle years
is largely due to Leibniz’s continued work and emendation
of those texts and the ideas they contain. When we come to
the key jurisprudential texts in this work, I will discuss their
various drafts and subsequent amendments or affirmations
as appropriate. I would also emphasise that I have chosen
not to focus too greatly on Leibniz’s definition of justice as
the charity of the wise. It plays its part in Chapters 7 and 8,
but Leibniz’s theory of justice has been the subject of several
important works, notably by Gaston Grua, Nicholas Riley,
Christopher Johns and René Sève, and on whose work I rely.
My research object is not justice itself, but the ‘how’ of how
we think about law. One might anachronistically say that I
am interested in Leibniz’s theory of how lawyers (should)
make sense of their moral world, though one could also argue
that it is about how Leibniz’s moralised world makes sense for
legal subjects. With the outer scope of this study determined,
this work proceeds as follows.
The first four chapters review some of the metaphysical
assumptions underpinning Leibniz’s legal theory, particu-
larly those pertaining to activity and power. Indeed, the
respective analyses of activity and power might be said to
provide two threads through this work. Chapter 1 introduces
Leibniz’s notion of the suppositum which I trace back through
Scholasticism to certain interpretations of the Aristotelean
metaphysics of activity (energeia). Chapter 2 provides a
broader discussion of activity and its relation to the meta-
physics of power in Aristotle (dunamei) and the Schoolmen
(potentia). I introduce a hermeneutic tool – the square of
3
ower – w
p hich then provides a framework for what follows.
Chapters 3 and 4 now take up the thread of power and its
relation to the will: Chapter 3 provides Scholastic context
for the theory of the will, while Chapter 4 exposes possible
reasons why Leibniz seeks to bring will and power together
as subalterns of action and endeavour; a move which appears
to demote power from its primary function in Scholastic
thought.
Chapters 5 through 8 are the legal theoretic core of this
work, and here the methodology shifts from a contextualisa-
tion of Leibniz’s early and middle period thinking to a spe-
cific focus on legal texts. Chapters 5 and to a degree 6 might
be said naturally to follow Chapters 1 and 2 in that their main
concern is how the Leibnizian supposit or activity helps us to
understand the central thrusts of both the De Casibus Perplexis
and the Nova Methodus Discendae Docendaeque Jurisprudentiae.
I seek to establish that it is the rational structure of supposi-
tive activity as such which motivates Leibniz’s claims as to
a commonality in juridical reasoning and a need for a teach-
ing of law through reflecting the innate structures of this
activity. These legal texts, however, also indicate develop-
ments in Leibniz’s thought whereby he begins to elaborate
the complementary function of the world, or state space, in
which this jurisprudential activity takes place. Chapters 7
and 8 engage in a detailed reading of the various versions of
Leibniz’s Elementa Iuris, seeking to show in particular how
Leibniz’s theory of will and potentia (Chapter 4) presupposes
such a concept of primary matter, or primary passive force,
which in the juridical context may called a ‘state space’. This
state space replaces the concept of potentia inherited from the
Schoolmen. Against the background of modal theory, I argue
in particular that appreciation of the role of the state space
allows us to understand the function of universal obligation
and prohibition in Leibniz’s thinking, and their difference
from the particular rights of legal actors.
My overall argument will amount to describing the follow-
ing arc. With the doctrine of the actus purus essendi, Aquinas
establishes that a self-actualising activity, such as the being
of God, amounts to a power (potentia) in this sense: it stands
as an exemplary principle and so cause for all other substan-
tial activities. This reconceptualisation of power runs against
4
Introduction
the Aristotelean division between activity and in-potency,
in which in-potency has the character of a deficiency. The
Thomist theory of power goes through several mutations
at the hands of thinkers such as Duns Scotus and Suárez,
and is put in particular issue through the philosophies of
Hobbes and Spinoza, who transform power from a divine
principle to something possessed by all humans in different,
physically (and natural legally) determined ways. Faced with
these transformations, Leibniz appears to reaffirm Aristotle’s
metaphysics: he advances a theory of the supposit or subject
as self-actualising activity shared in some way by God and
rational creature. At the same time he relegates potentia to
a specific expression of endeavouring (conari), and further-
more contrasts it with acting and its expression in will. Here
he meets the material philosophers of power, Hobbes and
Spinoza, halfway by understanding power as a determina-
tion of substantial activity but also as a potency that can
be appropriated for the purposes of the actualisation of the
individual. The effect of this relegation, however, appears
to produce an imbalance in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Like his
Scholastic and natural legal predecessors (such as Grotius) he
looks to external determination as the source of potentia, for
it must come from without if it is to be appropriated. But if
particular actions derive from substantial activity, where do
particular powers derive from, if not some primary potency?
The pre-Leibnizian history of power seems to have at least
this unity: that there is a primary potency at work which is
suffered by finite creatures as their God and/or their World.
As I follow Leibniz’s thinking on the supposit and potentia
into their applications in the legal texts, we will find that
Leibniz reconceptualises what may once have been under-
stood as power under a new name: the state space. It amounts
to Leibniz internalising the externality of potentia within each
substance as its moral world, and placing on each practical
agent a universal set of obligations and prohibitions defined
by that world. It is this internalised universal moral world
which, I claim, is Leibniz’s most novel contribution to the
concept of power and which sets the stage for Kantian practi-
cal philosophy.
5
A technical comment
The central drive of the first four chapters will be to establish
the framework which underpins Leibniz’s legal theory, prin-
cipally by situating it within the history of the concepts of
activity, potency, formality and reality. All these terms and
their Scholastic and Leibnizian cognates will be introduced as
I proceed, but there are four key logical terms which I employ
that are modern, and while they have cognates in Leibniz’s
thought, I believe the best course of action is to lay bare my
interpretation of these terms from the outset, at least so that
the reader be notified of their significance for the author, but
hopefully also to avoid any confusion for those of a legal
background who may encounter them for the first time. The
terms are these:
(a) extension;
(b) intension;
(c) pretension; and
(d) contension.
Each term draws on the radical ‘tension’ from the Italian

tendo and Greek teino, suggesting as it does a directed move-
ment of stretching out.5 The easiest way to understand these
terms is to examine how they explain a fifth key notion which
is absolutely essential, in my opinion, for comprehending
Leibniz’s very strange metaphysics: equivalence. Let us take
them in turn to see how equivalence operates in each case.
Extensionality concerns the interior elements of things, and
the clearest modern example of an extensional object is a
set – a collection of discrete objects which can also be sets.
For example, {4, 4, 4} is a set, with the contents of the set
being all the objects between the brackets, separated for
convenience by commas. To say two sets are extensionally
equivalent, we ask ‘Do the two sets contain exactly the same
objects?’ Thus {4, 4, 4} and {4, 4, 5} are not equivalent because
they contain different things, while {4, 4, 4} and {4, 4, 4} are
equivalent. Indeed, strictly speaking, the object ‘4’ is itself
extensionally equivalent to the object ‘4’ so that the following
are all equivalent: {4, 4, 4} and {4, 4} and {4}. This last point
indicates just what extensionality is interested in: the inside
6
Introduction
of objects; and the sort of thing it is blind to: relationships
between objects.
Historically, extensionality proved popular from the late
nineteenth century onwards following the set-theoretical
innovations of Cantor, particularly among the logical posi-
tivists in the Anglosphere. The weight and admitted bril-
liance of this heritage can therefore skew our appreciation
of the import and priority of extensionality as a logico-
philosophical basis, and may indeed render one blind to the
possibility of the existence of other logical bases for philoso-
phy prior to Cantor (or at all). Alain Badiou admits as much
in Logics of Worlds. His astonishing Being and Event provided
a set-theoretical account of ontology which lost nothing of the
vitality of Cantor’s original discoveries, but, as noted above,
set theory is blind to relationships between objects and as
an ontological tool in the hands of the unwitting it can have
all the power of a kitchen blender: it makes great soup but
at the expense of texture. To Badiou’s credit Logics of Worlds
attempts among other things to supplement a set-theoretic
ontology with a logic of relations based on the powerful
mathematical toolkit known as category theory. The logical
aspect of this theory – categori(c)al logic – could be defined
in contradistinction to set theory as that logic which is con-
cerned not with the contents of objects, but only with the
relationships between them.
Consider the following object: (4, 4, 4), which we will call
a list. The important point about a list as we define it here is
that there is an order and a length. Speaking purely in terms
of relationships there are three objects related together here,
and they are in the order shown. (4, 4, 4) is not equivalent to
(4) or any other list of 4s save (4, 4, 4) because no other list
relates exactly three objects in that way.
When we assess equivalence by reference to relationships
alone, this can be named intensional equivalence.6 Intensional
equivalence is critical to understanding Leibniz’s thinking,
though this may not yet be apparent from that first example.
An intuitive way of thinking about intensionality is to think of
intensions as arrows indicating relationships. Take a lecture
theatre with 100 seats. At 10am there is a lecture on property
law for 90 students. We can assign each student to the seat
they decide to sit in using arrows, one from each student
7
to their respective seat. At 11am, by some cruel administra-
tive fate, the same students are to attend a lecture in the
same theatre on company law. The students may stay in the
same seats or move around in the break between lectures.
We can compare the two seating arrangements student →
seat by comparing the arrows or relationships at 10am with
those at 11am. If they are the same in the case of each arrow
– if each student chooses the same seat each time – then the
two collections of relationships are said to be intensionally
equivalent. Now you might naturally think of these arrows
as simply placing student and seat side by side in a list, but it
is far better to think of the movement of each student to a seat
to grasp the active sense of intensionality.
Another example from physics: a heavenly body in the
cosmos as understood by Descartes and Leibniz. We are not
interested in the content of the planet; just where it is now
and where it is going to. Over time the planet moves from
its initial position p0 through space to some final reference
position pt, and we could describe that motion with an arrow,
like this: p0 → pt. This motion discloses two important things.
First, that the planet arrives at point t depends entirely on its
motion beginning at point 0 and is conditioned by it. However,
second, this conditioning tells us that the motion or arrow
itself is translatable to anywhere in space. The relationship
symbolised by the arrow has a generalisable aspect also. This
generalisable motion or arrow is the relationship between
the two states of the planets (or whatever bodies), and it is
this arrow or movement which intensionality concerns itself
with. How then can we ensure that our arrow p0 → pt speci-
fies just this heavenly body and not another? Remember, we
have refused to look at the object itself to do this; only its
relationships. Well, one way to identify just this heavenly
body is to do just what Descartes did: ask not only where
the heavenly body is going, but also how it arrived at its
starting point in the first place. So now we have two arrows:
p0 → pt proceeding from our object, and also 0 → p0 which is
an arrow from some arbitrary reference point for all objects
called the ‘origin’. In this way all objects are identified by
reference to the origin and their next movement. So, another
naïve way of thinking about intensional equivalence is to
say: two objects are equivalent if they have the same arrows
8
Introduction
pointing at them (if any) and the same arrows pointing from
them (if any).
In our primary area of focus – matters of jurisprudence –
we find Leibniz interested in conditional relationships which
are structurally similar to physical motions. Leibniz defines a
conditional proposition as having the following ‘content’: that
if the prior is true, the posterior is true.7 In modern language
this amounts to saying: if condition p0 then consequence pt,
or again p0 → pt. In like manner the consequential relation is
generalisable, and indeed we may well ask: we are assuming
condition p0, but what is the origin of that condition p0, or in
more natural language, if condition p0 caused the effect, what
caused condition p0 (and so on)?
For the purposes of interpreting Leibniz, it is enough
to grasp this naïve notion that Leibniz is interested not in
the extensional content of objects, but the relationships or
arrows between them, and that these arrows represent v erbs
– movements of being, of thought and of (physical) action.
We shall see that if one strictly ignores extensional difference
one can posit a metaphysics in which substances are not con-
tained in a single ‘world’; that each substance can constitute
its own world without windows on the others, provided that
all the intensional information defining each substance’s rela-
tionships in that world is equivalent.
Pretensionality plays almost as great a role in this work
as intensionality. The neologism is suggested by Leibniz’s
consistently stated thesis that the possible pretends or claims
(prétend) to exist. As we shall see in detail in Chapter 4, it
is not so much the possible that actively pretends to exist-
ence; rather, the possible only pretends to existence under
the action of some entelechy (the End). For Leibniz that entel-
echy is mediately the more or less perfect rational mind, and
ultimately the wholly perfect actuality of God. This duality
is essential, for merely formal possibility is nothing unless a
self-actualising substantial form determines a global purpose
for this possibility: the actualisation of the substantial form.
In this way every compossible logical possibility is subject
to a valuation with respect to its dominant substantial form,
a valuation apprehended as ‘its’ pretension to exist. What is
best is referred to the perfection of a substantial form, though
it may appear to be claimed by and move from the possibility.
9
Pretensionality concerns the relationship between an object
and a principle, or innate idea. The most concise and power-
ful example of this notion can already be found in the first
Proposition of Proclus’ Elements of Theology: ‘there can be no
multiplicity which does not participate in unity’. According
to one perspective, and here Cantor and Badiou spring to
mind again, this proposition includes the claim that a multi-
plicity cannot be unless it is submitted to the action of unifica-
tion. In other words, as subsequent propositions reveal, it is
the action of the One to evaluate the multiplicity of primary
matter and make of it an intelligible being as a collection of
discrete units or simplest forms. Yet this action is not opera-
tive or causal, but participative. Matter moves towards unity
in the exemplary presence of the One. In this example we see
that each discrete unit is defined only by its having become
a discrete unit, and that as such its claim to existence is as
good as any other such u nit – they are exchangeable with
respect to value. We thus have a notion of particular preten-
sional equivalence, though if we are strict, we should compare
the universal pretensional valuations of two entelechies to
determine whether these entelechies are equivalent. Let us
imagine, for example, some discrete units of wood and metal
nails. Then we may also posit a unity which combines these,
which we call a table. In one sense the table has just as much
unity as each piece of wood and each nail, but in another
crucial sense, the unity of the table composes more subordi-
nate unities within itself. The table simply acts to be a table,
but its composing unities are brought under that activity
and function to support its actualisation. Observe that each
nail could have done a great many things (been used in a
door or a fence), and that we might describe these possible
uses as ‘degrees of freedom’. Well, now this nail functions as
part of a table, and in this restriction on what a nail can do
by its subordination to the table’s actuality, we can begin to
grasp just what pretension is all about: a certain kind of func-
tional explanation closely linked to relationships of order of
respective components for some actuality. The restriction has
a positive side for the nail, however. For Leibniz there is
no reason why a nail should choose one possible state (in a
door/ in a table etc.). These are simply formal possibilities.
By being related to a table’s actuality – by being subject to
10
Introduction
a pretension – o ne of the nail’s possible states now claims a
right to existence as part of that table. Under pretension the
formal becomes the real.
For its part, the table’s actuality is referred to its capacity
to order and bring unity to these disparate and subordinate
unities, and the more such unities that ‘pretend’ towards tabu-
larity, the more ‘reality’ we say the table possesses. We might
further observe both that each nail itself composes ferrous
molecules, and that the table composes part of human habita-
tion. In this way, each level of combinations may indeed be
combinations of other combinations, and so on to an infinity
in which only the One is capable of providing for unity for all.
By observing the respective structure of these combinations
– how they are respectively ordered in terms of combination
and level – we may draw equivalences between them and
thereby make valuations as to their relative complexity, that
is, the number of composing combinations, which Leibniz
terms their ‘degree of reality’.
Chapter 4 proceeds to account for pretension according to
the way the term is deployed by Leibniz in his philosophy,
and not by means of a logical apparatus that we would need
to impute. The core intuition, though, can be stored for future
use: entelechies as final principles invest matter with preten-
sions to exist, and Leibniz will regard God as the pre-eminent
such entelechy.
What I call contensionality plays less of a role in this work,
although I do not wish completely to exclude its relevance for
understanding Leibniz’s thinking. Briefly, using intensional-
ity, and regarding extensionality as a special minimum case
of intensionality in which intensions are reduced to zero,
one can begin to construct theoretical ‘worlds’ constituted
of objects and such relationships as are desired (subject to
strict criteria which I shall pass over). One such world could
consist of an object ‘1’ and a movement or operation that
says, ‘given object x let there by an object x’ known as its
successor’. Such a world would consist of a central 1 and an
expanding series of branches to successors of 1 in all direc-
tions. We might take the same world and add additional
operations which require that there can be only one, unique
successor of 1 at every step. This world would look like the
system of natural numbers.
11
Now, both these worlds have objects and relationships, so
are they equivalent? Clearly not given that the latter world
is subject to additional intensional information. Contensional
equivalence is this comparison of the objects and relationships
of a whole world. Remarkably, as Badiou investigates in the
Logics of Worlds, the system of (non-)equivalence relations
between worlds can also be studied, and is in my opinion
one of the most important areas of investigation in logical
foundations. I have chosen the term contensionality to
describe this system of global relationships partly thanks
to a suggestion by the combinatorial logicians Curry, Feys
and Craig8 who suggest ‘contention’ for the logical analysis
of the significance of an object or relationship within one
world by reference to the objects and relations of another
world. Contensionality then is a theory of how meaning and
signification operate, for it deals with the interpretation of
one world by reference to its contextualisation by another.
Academics deploy contensionality all the time: a methodol-
ogy is a contension because it interprets, say, the observed
facts of punishment by reference, say, to the discursive world
of Foucault or the discursive world of positive penal law.
For the purposes of this work contensionality will play only
a negative role, for we will examine how Leibniz seeks to
establish that all moral matters are reducible to the same
juridical activity of God and the same, common world that
he creates.
By way of summary then, the reader should be alive to
the difference between extensional and intensional thinking,
and to the centrality of intensionality – and as the reader will
see, the word ‘intensionality’ can here almost be replaced
with the word ‘activity’ – to Leibniz’s metaphysics. In
Chapter 4 the notion of pretensionality will stand forth as the
theoretical mechanism Leibniz deploys to convert the logi-
cally possible into the real by reference to the entelechies of
finite and divine substantial forms. At the very least, they
become a hermeneutical device for understanding Aristotle’s
entelechies. Yet this technical discussion should be taken as
underpinning the rest of this work, for the principal meth-
odology will comprise a contextualisation (indeed, a conten-
sion!) of Leibniz’s natural legal doctrine within the history of
ideas by reference to primary and secondary literature. This
12
Introduction
discussion amounts to a technical abstraction of key notions
from the contexts in which they emerge in what follows.
Notes
1. Georgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and
the Religion of Capitalism (Adam Kotsko trans.) (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2019), p.62.
2. Gwenaëlle Aubry, Genèse du Dieu souverain (Paris: Vrin, 2018);
see also her Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez
Aristote et chez Plotin (Paris: Vrin, 2006).
3. Agamben, Creation and Anarchy, p.63.
4. Ibid. p.63.
5. See Plato’s Crito 47c, cf. Thaetetus 163a, and the antonym in
Gorgias 458b.
6. Not to be confused with intentionality, which is a term of art
both in phenomenology and in the work of Aquinas. I discuss
Aquinas’ use of intentionality in Chapter 1, ‘The distinctions
and unity of Trinity. Mind’.
7. De Conditionibus, A:VI, i, 102, Def.1.
8. Haskell Curry, Robert Feys and William Craig, Combinatorial
Logic Vol. 1 (Dordrecht: N. Holland, 1958).
13
One
From Trinity to Mind:
The Intensional Basis of the Law
1. Introduction
It is strange thing that a philosopher so determined to elabo-
rate a juridical theory justifying the City of God should settle
upon a metaphysics in which individuals are absolutely dis-
joint and separated. How can Leibniz speak of community,
of a kingdom of grace, when a philosophy of perception and
reflection encloses every substantial form within itself and
denies it even windows on the ‘world’? Leibniz’s solution to
this self-imposed restriction is to look not to subject or object
of lived experience, but to look to the very activities of being,
thinking and acting themselves. I propose to examine what I
regard as a critical fragment on the structural equivalence of
Mind and Trinity to establish Leibniz’s reliance on the equiv-
alence of these activities as the basis for community both in
formal and practical spheres. The inner structure expressed
by this fragment will appear at several points in this chapter
as I draw out its significance, and this initial treatment will
pave the way for a complete analysis of the structure itself in
Chapter 2.
My examination is organised according to two interpre-
tative themes. In the first half of this chapter I investigate
the Scholastic doctrine of the supposit, taken up by Leibniz,
and indicate its origin in the doctrine of activity and power
which Aquinas derives from Aristotle via Plotinus. I argue
that Leibniz understands the supposit as a perfected activity
of being, knowing or acting, which is expressed in persons
and phenomena. In the second half of this chapter, I show
how Scholastic debates on being-in-common provide inter-
pretative context for Leibniz’s own account of the commu-
nity of substantial forms. I seek to link the supposit to the
14
From Trinity to Mind
primary or innate ideas that Leibniz discusses in his middle
period to argue that it is the supposit which affords com-
munity between substantial forms. The supposit enables
community, I claim, by means of intensional equivalence:
that kind of equivalence in which we concern ourselves not
with the similarity of various entities that think, nor that of
diverse objects of thought, but rather with the equivalence
of the movement of thinking itself. I also highlight a problem
community raises: if substances are the same in some essen-
tial respect, what continues to differentiate them? The initial
answer of this chapter – that differentiation is due to reality,
and so power – will lead naturally to the investigation of
power and the real in the three chapters that follow.
This work will ultimately permit us, in Chapters 5 and 6,
an interpretation of Leibniz’s jurisprudential theory which
emphasises his claim as to fundamental commonality of
juridical thinking as such. To do this, however, we must
spend some time drawing together the influences which
allowed Leibniz to advance such a doctrine.
2. The divine activity

Let us turn to then to the context from which emerges
Leibniz’s intensional theory of supposita or substantial forms,
as he calls them up to the end of his middle period (1699).
Our methodological concern is that Leibniz’s accounts both
of supposita and of activity not only draw on Scholastic phi-
losophy, but find their most expansive expression within
Leibniz’s natural theological works. If contextualisation is to
occur, this chapter must provide a degree of framing of those
works if only to aid the reader. I would therefore like to begin
by providing a broad outline of the metaphysics of activity
and power from Aristotle through to Aquinas.
A particular difficulty for the reader is that the Schoolmen
bind the natural philosophy of activity and power to their
own theological concerns. A central such concern is provid-
ing for a coherent explanation of the Trinitarian structure
of God, understood as the three moments: esse, nosse and
velle, or being, knowing and willing. As is well known, in
the thirteenth century this broad Trinitarian model, inherited
from Augustine, is reinterpreted and clarified by Thomas
15
Aquinas amongst others thanks to the reception of that part
of Aristotle’s surviving works that passed via the Arab world.
As Étienne Gilson notes, there results a tension between the-
ological orthodoxy concerning a Trinity heavily influenced
by Neoplatonism, and the logical power of the works of
Aristotle, a thinker owing no allegiance to an Abrahamic god.
This tension is most acute in the way Aquinas takes the
Stagirite’s discussion of being (einai) and, as Gilson sug-
gests, ‘extracts the latent order’ in the Metaphysics in order
to explain esse. This, Gilson argues,1 is achieved in three
stages. First, a primary philosophy must take as its object that
which is supremely intelligible, and this object is that which
is common to all other things: being (ens commune). Now
having grasped this common object, our philosophy must
interrogate it, and the route to understanding is via its causes.
Thus the second stage investigates the intelligible causes of all
being. It is a move which abstracts from the sensible given in
favour of the abstract intellectual, and in so doing constitutes
the intellect as replete with formal essences of things. In this
search for the causes of all things the mind comes to rest
on universal causes and, ultimately, the Prime Mover as the
maximally intelligible cause. Third, then, metaphysics seeks
to understand the Prime Mover. We now are dealing not with
a formal idea, but with an actually existing substance, indeed
a substance whose essence is existence and which is cause
of self. This third perspective engages in a description of the
properties of such a Being – notably its activity and power –
and the nature of its causal relations with itself and others.
This Being is the object of metaphysics proper.
One can discern in this analysis the involution that occurs
already in Greek thought, and particularly in the hands of
Plotinus, as Gwenaëlle Aubry has shown. Aristotle’s ana-
lytical discovery of the Prime Mover as an ousia energeia or
perfected activity is inverted such that the perfected activity
of the Prime Mover becomes a dunamis pantôn or power-to-
all that is the principle of a system measured according to
perfection. We have been led to the One and we are invited
now to review the three stages of metaphysical analysis from
an inverse perspective. It is this One, accessible to all rational
souls through metaphysics, which is the ens commune – the
being apprehended in any intellectual act. It is in and for this
16
One that the intellectual act of delineating the principles of
created things is united with the causal prowess of that very
act, for given that this One is established as cause of every
cause, it possesses immediate access to every such formal
essence. It is this One which is capable even of bringing about
its own actualisation, is capable of rendering concrete and
real that which was merely formal.
Yet the Neoplatonist inversion of the Aristotelean analysis
of being into a cosmological procession from the One remains
problematic for the Abrahamic theologians. Plotinus and
Proclus continue to regard unity as cause of being, and thus
being, its properties, and so divinity, as lower in the order
of reasons; a doctrine wholly untenable for the Christians.
There is need for a further inversion, as we shall see, whereby
being is raised to first principle and takes on the functions of
unity, which is to say the function of unification itself. Being
becomes the means by which all the other metaphysical prop-
erties and attributes are knotted together in God.
We can imagine permutations of three key terms within
this metaphysics: being, activity and power. Gwenaëlle
Aubry has succinctly shown how the permutation of these
three terms is varied at key moments in the history of phil
osophy prior to Early Modern period:2
(a) For Aristotle activity (energeia) stands at the head of the

system and being is analysed by reference to it. Power is
understood as in-potency (dunamei), which is to say that
power is the incompleteness of an ordered activity in
achieving its end, that is, what activity aims to actualise
but has not yet achieved. To be in-potency is to lack actu-
ality (entelecheia).
(b) With Plotinus we see a reappraisal of potency at the
expense of activity. The dunamis pantôn (omnipotence)
can be understood as perfect organising principle which
is the final cause of the being and activity of created
things. Named the One, it stands in priority to being and
activity, both as cause and End.
(c) The third permutation of activity–power–being, in which
being is raised to the apex of our triad is heralded by
Aquinas. Activity and absolute power (potentia) are now
regarded as flowing from a necessary and perfect being
17
as the power (virtus) of its being: God constitutes Himself
as One and Good by a pure act of being, and it is this
actus purus essendi which as organising principle is the
foundation of his absolute power.
The argument of this work rests on the centrality of energeia,

understood as activity, for Leibniz’s notion of legal thought.
Insofar as energeia is understood as an activity we will see
that Leibniz is more faithful to Aristotle than Aquinas, and
in this way: for Aquinas there is a need to regard the activity
of God, instantiated in the relations of the Trinity, as both
eternal and simple. Combine that with the methodology of
natural theology – the continuous abstraction from sensi-
ble nature – and the resulting tendency is to do that which
Aristotle appears to reject, namely to find at the root of all
things fixed and immovable forms rather than a principle
of self-movement. Leibniz characteristically will maintain
the orthodoxy of being’s primacy while reallocating activity
within this prevailing Trinitarian structure and reducing by
a certain measure the role of power. In short, activity will
resume its primacy and power will be an effect, in the last
analysis, of the encounter between the finite acts of creatures.
A central result for the history of legal philosophy is that it
is activity – particularly intellectual activity epitomised by
juridical thinking – and not power which will come to play
being’s role of a ‘common activity’ if you will, and so a means
by which persons are bound together by law.
The nexus between Leibniz’s doctrine of activity and theo-
logical concerns is perhaps most succinctly expressed in a
phrase that Leibniz repeats throughout our period of study; a
phrase that introduces us to a very technical Scholastic term:
actions are of supposits (actiones sunt suppositorum). In what
follows I shall endeavour to situate Leibniz’s thinking on
activity within his theological context; to discuss key theo-
logical debates which will clarify why Leibniz should appear
to regard activity, and not power, as the means of unifying a
world.
18
3. Trinity. Mind
Sometime during the middle of 1671 Leibniz sketches out
a . . . matrix in which he relates the triune nature of God
to the structure of the mind in act. The Akademie Edition
has named the fragment ‘Trinitas. Mens’, and I follow this
nomenclature:3
BODY. WORLD TRINITY. MIND

Space Intellect Being (esse)
Figure Imagination Knowing (scire)
Motion Will. Power Act (agere) or
endeavouring (conari)
As Maria Rosa Antognazza has noted,4 this sketch for the

Elementa de Mente exhibits a most interesting combination of
Scholastic Trinitarian thinking (the esse–nosse–velle triad) and
the mechanism Leibniz had encountered in his recent reading
of Hobbes (the linkage of will and power through conation).
The matrix contains a great deal of information which it will
be necessary to unpack, even if we limit ourselves to a con-
sideration of activity and disregard for now the question of
power. A preliminary reading of the matrix draws our atten-
tion to the following apparent equivalences: (i) between the
structure of corporeal nature (BODY. WORLD) and the incor-
poreal (TRINITY. MIND); (ii) within the incorporeal realm,
between Trinity and Mind, thus implying also finite minds;
and (iii) between each of the terms of a triad (the columns),
for it seems indeed that they are to be united as one. Two dif-
ferences are also worthy of remark: (a) between the headed
columns and the third column, where it is quite apparent that
the third column deploys verbs that range across the nouns
in the first two columns; and (b) the duality of will/power
and the verbs to act/endeavour, in the bottom row. As this
latter point pertains to power, I reserve discussion of it to
subsequent chapters.
As this book’s principle focus is the law I will not engage
directly with debates concerning the relationship between
body and mind; my emphasis is rather on legal thought and
so the activity of jurisprudential thinking. I wish therefore
to concentrate our attention on two equivalences and one
19
distinction from the above, each of which I argue help us to
understand Leibniz’s thinking about law and to contextualise
them in theologico-political debates. These questions are:
(a) How is it possible that the three aspects of Leibnizian

mind and Trinity (intellect, imagination, will) are
deemed equivalent such that they can subsist in the same
individual?
(b) How is it possible that different i ndividuals – the Trinity
and a given m ind – can be treated by Leibniz as equiva-
lent in structure but not the same individual substance
(the Spinozan problem)?
(c) What is the theoretical purpose of the distinction between
the nominal Trinity. Mind column and the verbal column
in the above matrix?
The answers to these questions will clarify the central role

activity plays in Leibniz’s thought. In what remains of this
chapter I tackle questions (a) and (b). These answers will
provide a basis for engaging with question (c). in Chapter 2.
3.1 The distinctions and unity of Trinity. Mind

The role of the supposit
Leibniz’s matrix immediately imports into the Mind the theo-
logical problems inherent in the Trinity, and not least how
it is that if God is simple, he can unite the three persons
and the divine attributes in one. For surely to do so would
impute multiplicity to God. The potential solutions pro-
posed by the Schoolmen are several and subtle, and because
Leibniz appears reticent to disclose his Scholastic inspira-
tions, though he seeks to conform ‘with the principles of
the noblest Scholastic[s]’,5 it can be difficult to isolate which
proposed solutions help us understand Leibniz’s own posi-
tion. I follow the indication of Leroy Loemker6 that our route
to understanding Leibniz’s thinking on Trinity and Mind is
through the concept of the supposit. With the phrase ‘actiones
sunt suppositorum [actions pertain to supposits]’, which
Leibniz deploys in his 1668 notes On Transsubstantiation, in
the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), and in the published On
Nature Itself (1698) – thus throughout our period of study
20
– we have a term of art which points us to both a theologi-
cal problem and a subset of possible solutions. To establish
this, my argument proceeds in four stages which require a
contextualisation of the notion of ‘supposit’. First, follow-
ing closely the work of Gwenaëlle Aubry, I describe how
Aristotle develops the notion of ousia energeia to describe the
perfected action of the Prime Mover, and how Aquinas takes
up this metaphysical structure and modifies it by ascribing
power to God in a new way as active potency (potentia activa).
Second, I show how that debate concerning power provides
the framework for interpreting Aquinas’ account of the sup-
posit. I claim not only that for Aquinas a supposit is one of
the markers of a substantial individual, and that it is equiva-
lent to a perfected action productive of power, but also that
Aquinas argues that more than one supposit is active in the
mind of God viz. being, knowing and willing. Third, I use
the foregoing framework to critique Brandon Look’s reading
of Leibniz on the supposit, showing that Look’s account
remains wedded to a form–matter interpretation of Aristotle
which is, given what we have established concerning activity
and power, not appropriate when dealing with ousia energeia.
Finally, I present Leibniz’s own account of the supposit, par-
ticularly in the context of its deployment as part of an argu-
ment concerning transubstantiation.
The metaphysical structure of the problem

Drawing closely on Gwenaëlle Aubry’s inspiring work on
power from Aristotle to Aquinas,7 we can set out a meta-
physical structure which will assist our understanding of the
supposit. Now, during the argumentation of his Metaphysics,8
Aristotle leaves behind the well-known division of form and
matter and develops a deeper division between two terms:
energeia and dunamis. The former derives from en-ergon, and
thus has the sense of ‘being-at-work’, whereas the latter can
already be found in Plato’s Theaetetus and has a sense of
power to do. Energeia and dunamis are said to be contraries
in the sense that energeia describes what is actual about a
substance, whereas dunamis is that which the substance has
the capacity to do but which it is not presently doing. Both
terms have a universal sense in that they range across numer-
ous individual actions and passions respectively. Thus, the
21
activity (energeia) of walking implies a sequence of steps;
the respective potentiality of not walking or standing still,
implies individual impediments to progress in a direction.
The latter understanding of what is implied by or subaltern
to ‘not walking’ is designed to indicate the contrary nature
of the implied terms: step and impediment. If the step is
an action, the impediment is a passion with respect to the
action. For this reason, we can speak of these subalterns as
active potency and passive potency. Finally, observe that the
passive potency of the individual impediment is both quali-
tatively different from the particular action (the step) and
qualitatively and quantitatively different from the universal
activity (walking as such). Hence it is also said that the activ-
ity and the passive potency are in contradiction, and the same
can be said for any two terms which are both quantitatively
and qualitatively opposed.
The interplay between energeia and dunamis helps Aristotle
to measure the perfection of things. If the activity is walking,
then the steps are attempts at achieving the end or telos of
having walked (Meta IX [1047a20–30]). The perfected mani-
festation of the activity is its actuality (entelecheia). To the
extent that the activity is not achieved due to impediments
to individual actions, we say that each individual action has
suffered a passion – a passive potency – and that generally
the activity is not perfected but still incomplete and potential
in some way. We can thus envisage a movement from activ-
ity to active potency, and a movement from active potency,
determined by passive potency, back to activity and seeking
to actualise it as entelecheia. A circular process.
From this basic structure Aristotle develops a new usage
that plays on the sense of dunamis: dunamei or in-potency
(Aubry, ‘Ousia energeia’, p.828, see further p. 63). Aristotle
appears to define it as the principle of the motion ordered by
the act that is also that being’s end and its own proper good.9
From the foregoing we see that Aristotle is describing just
that process from activity to action to entelecheia, to the extent
incomplete by virtue of some determination by dunamis.
From these insights, Aristotle has occasion to consider a
substance which is not subject to impediment and so poten-
tiality. Such a substance is an activity which implies a series
of acts and each such act is not determined in any way, such
22
that all acts are perfected and the activity is fully actualised.
Here there is a complete lack of in-potency (dunamei) such
that the activity of substance is perfected. Aristotle calls this
special limit case ousia energeia10 – essential activity – and calls
the substance which achieves this perfected circular process
the Prime Mover. It is to be observed that while these con-
siderations do use the language of movement, Aristotle is
explicit that his findings extend beyond movement to onto-
logical matters.11
For Aquinas the activity par excellence is being (esse), and
starting not with finite things but with God, his first philoso-
phy arrives directly at that individual who achieves essential
activity with respect to esse. Thus, we are invited to consider
the activity of being and the acts it implies, the elaboration of
a thing’s nature as its essence. Following Aristotle, we could
argue that there is a limit case of an entity which is no way
impeded from elaborating its essence, and in this case the
essence is fully developed and the entity’s being is fully actu-
alised. This said, for Aquinas it is more important that such a
case be not just a possible special case, but that it be necessary.
This is achieved, in Aquinas’ view, by observing that any other
entity may well endeavour to elaborate its nature, but while it
may well order its actions to actualise an activity formaliter – it
may produce all the determinations that define ‘going for a
walk’ – the one thing a finite entity cannot do is give being
to going for a walk. And this for the simple reason that to
suppose otherwise would be to suppose that if the entity can
grant being to ‘going for a walk’, it can grant being to itself
in any respect and so cause itself to be. This, Aquinas holds,
is not the case for finite entities, but it is the very definition
of God. Whereas all other creatures must obtain being from
another source, and so are marked by potentiality (potentiali-
tas) and lack, God’s activity is being, and to elaborate himself
is to actualise that being. The result: his essence does not differ
from his being, needing only his being and nothing else: his
essence is his being (sua essentia est suum esse).12
Now one might question whether Aquinas has advanced
that far from Aristotle’s ousia energeia with this argu-
ment. There are innovations, particularly in the way that
essence shifts from being the aggregate of actions (a static,
elaborated nature) to describing the activity of being in its
23
self actualisation (the whole process), but perhaps even this
is implicit in ousia energeia, and only appears novel when set
against an interpretation of Aquinas which regards essences
as fixed and definitional. Aubry establishes,13 however, that it
is Aquinas’ next move which achieves the rupture.
We have our circular p rocess – essence as being – but
whereas for Aristotle this defines both a completedness or
lack of potentiality and a certain immobility, Aquinas now
reintroduces power. The circular process becomes itself a
node with respect to which power can be spoken of in a new
sense. Here, in the Summa contra Gentiles in particular,14 termi-
nological distinctions are identified between potentialitas and
words such as posse, potestas and virtus which imply power
in the sense, I would say, of capacity to bring about an action
in another. The central point here is that Aquinas identifies
an ethical character to the perfection of God’s being, in the
Aristotelean sense that others apprehend this perfection as an
excellence and seek to move towards it. It is this procurement
of movement which marks the divine virtus essendi (power
or force of being), but also indicates that the movement does
not flow from God; rather it flows from that second entity
which apprehends this power. On this basis Aquinas and his
followers can speak of an order of eminence graded accord-
ing to degrees of perfection, each creature being measured by
their virtus and being moved to others of greater perfection
according to their measure.
To illustrate his point, we may, as Aquinas does on occa-
sion (and indeed the Neoplatonists on whom he draws), use
the analogy of fire (the sun is the best example) and heat.15
The sun itself, Aquinas will argue, is essentially hot and could
not be itself without this heating activity. In other words, its
power-of-heating is fully actualised for itself. Wood is not
essentially hot but becomes so in the presence of the sun’s
irradiation. It thus receives heat from the flame and becomes
like it according to its potentiality to receive the heat: its power-
for-heating. The sun, however, according to Aquinas’ under-
standing of physics, loses nothing of its heating capacity in
this. It remains immobile and eternally irradiating without
any diminution to this perfected activity.
Thanks to Aubry’s endeavours, we hopefully have been
able to set out a basic metaphysical framework of an activ-
24
ity which acts and through this perfectly actualises itself.
Furthermore, we understand that esse is the primary activity
to be analysed according to this framework, and that the
perfection of the activity gives rise to a new understanding
of power. My argument will be that the notion of supposit
which Leibniz inherits from Aquinas and the Schoolmen is
built upon this framework of perfected activity implying act,
and act moving to actuality.
The supposit in Aquinas

It seems that the term ‘supposit’ first appears in Aquinas’
Summa Theologiae (‘ST’) during his treatment of the question
of the plurality divine persons. Aquinas wishes to deal with
the following problem: to an individual substance should
belong a single essential definition which allows us to pick
it out, but if three persons are said of God, are there not
three essences, three persons, three substances even? But if
we deny this by claiming that our distinction of persons is
entirely verbal, not real, then the doctrine of the Trinity seems
to be a mere analogy by humans and not really in God. It
is just a ‘manner of our speaking’ and no basis from which
to draw theological conclusions. How then to find the three
persons in one substance with one divine essence without
imputing plurality? Aquinas identifies one route to a solu-
tion in Aristotle’s Metaphysics V [1017b10–25], where the
Philosopher argues that substance is twofold. On Aquinas’
reading, substance:
In one way . . . means the quiddity of a thing, signified by

its definition, and thus we say that the definition means
the substance of a thing; in which sense substance is
called by the Greeks ousia, what we may call ‘essence’. In
another way substance means a subject or ‘suppositum,’
which subsists in the genus of substance. To this, taken in
a general sense, can be applied a name signifying an inten-
tion [intentionem]; and thus it is called ‘suppositum.’(ST I,
q.29, a.2)
In saying that one sense of substance is as an individual’s

thisness and determination (the tode ti kai khoriston), Aquinas
follows Aristotle directly, but in saying substance can
25
also mean a subject or supposit, he appears to introduce a
very strong interpretation of the relevant source. After all,
Aristotle says substance can mean ‘the ultimate substratum’
(hupokeimenon eskhaton) and in the preceding discussion he
gives the traditional Greek examples of earth, fire and water
‘and everything of the sort’. Aristotle adds that he is speak-
ing of the ultimate substratum ‘which is no longer predicated
of anything else’ (rather everything else is predicated of it).
This is perhaps suggestive of a certain materiality, given that
Aristotle exemplifies the definitional meaning of substance
by reference to shape and form.16 It certainly seems a little
surprising that Aquinas should adopt this distinction of
senses of ‘substance’ – as definition and as substrate – and
then so wholly depart from the materialistic sense of sub-
strate in favour of expressive ‘intentions’. Has Aquinas cited
the Stagirite as authority even as he has substituted ‘inten-
tions’ for materiality?
The confusion is avoided on further examination of
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in light of the readings by Aubry17
and Focillon.18 In Metaphysics VIII Aristotle returns to a con-
sideration of the substrate, seeking to apply the logic of the
categories to his explanatory candidates: matter and form.
His analysis will lead to a proposal for better explanatory
tools, but at this stage Aristotle’s focus is on matter alone and
the argument that matter itself may be investigated for its
behaviour as if it had form beneath that imposed by, say, the
craftsman. The Stagirite’s illustrations are helpful: the matter
of the sea is water, but the smoothness of the sea is also an
aspect of this water.19 Aubry argues20 that it is Aristotle’s
claim that matter is ousia in-potency which sets up the possi-
bility of also considering matter as ousia in act (hos energeian).
In the given example the water is the ousia in-potency; the
smoothness of the water is its actuality which expresses a
kind of form through the matter. In a second example, air
is the ousia in-potency of weather; stillness is the ousia in act
of the air.21 Accordingly substance is said in three senses of
matter as substrate: as ousia in-potency, ousia in act, and the
substance which is the combination of these.22
We have then in the material substrate two possible senses
of substance also, and their combination. Yet Aquinas for
his part is not speaking of matter but of individuals, and
26
Aristotle is clear that matter lacks the relevant thisness (tode ti)
to constitute an individual. Aquinas is nevertheless drawing
on an argument concerning matter for support. Why? Well it
would seem that Aquinas is following Aristotle in constantly
abstracting from the given as he moves towards a science of
being. Aquinas extracts what is still active from the twofold
distinction within material ousia and combines this with
the formal essence provided by definition. The motivation
appears to be that we are dealing with incorporeal beings,
namely God and minds, and accordingly:
. . . in things not composed of matter and form, in which

individualization is not due to individual matter—that is
to say, to ‘this’ matter—the very forms being individual-
ised of themselves—it is necessary the forms themselves
should be subsisting ‘supposita’. Therefore ‘suppositum’
and nature in them are identified. (ST I, q.3, a.3)
I would suggest that Aquinas has sought to resolve his the-

ological problem of the divine persons by use of this form
of argument of Aristotle now transposed to the incorporeal
realm. Specifically, having identified a sense of substance as
a substrate, and this substrate as material, Aquinas observes
that the material substrate can be either ousia in act or in-
potency. Now, here in-potency signifies the passive potency
proper to matter, and improper to individuals as such, and
so he discards this candidate for the supposit leaving ousia
in act. But then has not Aquinas recovered the ousia energeia
of Aristotle – the self-perfecting activity of substance – which
Aquinas makes the basis and measure of a substance’s per-
fection and power? I claim that this is just what Aquinas has
done: that a supposit is the self-perfecting activity of an individual.
To achieve this abstraction, Aquinas proceeds in stages
to replace matter with rational nature, and then replaces
rational nature with essence, and so ultimately with the pure
act of being. It is a move which is perhaps most clearly seen
in Aquinas’ second ‘Quodlibetal Question’:
What the nature signifies includes only what belongs to

the reason of the species; however the supposit possesses
not only what pertains to the reason of the species, but also
27
other things which belong to it accidentally; and thus the
supposit is signified according to the whole, whereas the
nature, or quiddity, [is] the formal part. However, in God
alone there is found no accident beyond his essence, for his
existence is his essence, as has been said; and therefore in
God the supposit is wholly identical with the nature. In an
angel, however, it is not wholly identical: for there is some-
thing that belongs to it accidentally beyond what belongs
to the reason of its species, since the existence as such of
the angel is beyond its essence or nature . . . (Emphasis in
original)23
This move sets up the following hierarchy. Our basic struc-

ture is an activity–action couplet, where the action of interest
is the development of a rational nature. By way of analogy
we may thing of a program as a series of intensional instruc-
tions to do this and that (if input = ‘name?’ then output =
‘my name is Stephen’) and the results of that program doing
those things – what the program actually writes – as the actu-
alised rational nature which follows. At the bottom of the
hierarchy we have the human, whose activity endeavours to
write its rational nature. But what makes a human a human
– its rational n
ature – is not a complete individuating state
of this particular human. Humans need other things to actu-
ally exist; they lack a certain actuality, or, in Aristotelean
language, they are by definition in a state of potentiality. On
the one hand the human needs non-human nature (matter),
such as food to exist. On the other hand, Aquinas argues, the
human cannot exist unless its existence as such is granted by
God, so likewise the human rational nature is lacking in this
way. On the middle rung of the hierarchy, Aquinas posits
angels which do not have need of matter to actualise their
rational natures, but they still require existence to be granted
by God. Thus angels are fully actual as regards their rational
natures but for the definitional limitation that they lack exist-
ence unless granted to them by another.
This leads us to the limit case of God at the top of the
ladder. Gwenaëlle Aubry24 underscores just what Aquinas
does: he grants to activity an essentialising causality, the effect
of which is the divine essence, but also this divine essence is
not a ‘structure’ or ‘nature’ separate from the act, the divine
28
essence is the structure of essentialising causality: the actus
purus essendi.25 Aubry highlights the following from the ST:
‘And since in God there is nothing potential [potentiale] . . .,
it follows that in Him essence does not differ from his being.
Therefore his essence is his being [Sua igitur essentia est suum
esse]’ (ST I, q.3, a.4). This all suggests a shift of focus away
from the result of activity. We are no longer particularly con-
cerned with a static nature which is the product of activity,
but rather with an activity which produces itself. But then
the product is the activity (of being), and accordingly we
focus on an essence which is the activity of being. Returning
to our maritime example, we now look to the propagating
‘waviness’ of waves, or to use Aquinas’ own analogy already
discussed in the preceding subsection, to the thermic activity
of what is hot:
Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that

genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause
of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something
which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness,
and every other perfection; and this we call God. (ST I, q.2,
a.3)
As we saw earlier, if wood is hot, its heat has been transferred

to it by another thing that is hot, and indeed the hotness
of the wood consists in this transfer and not in something
intrinsically in the wood. Yet there is a thing which is by its
nature hot, and this is fire (and more particularly for Aquinas’
predecessors, the sun), which both produces heat to make it
what it is and to affect others. By analogy then, some things be
because they are caused to be by something that is, but there
is a thing which is which causes itself to b e – a gain the pure
act of being.
We see that the relevant activity is the structure of being
(esse), but we should remain mindful that Aquinas faces a
theological difficulty: unlike the Prime Mover, the God of
Christian dogma is three persons. For Aristotle, as Aubry
has brilliantly shown,26 the Prime Mover, while immobile,
is the simple principle of motion, wish and so forth.27 The
Trinity, however, is of three persons or supposita. This is the
structure Aquinas elaborates and which it seems Leibniz will
29
adopt. The texts suggest that only if some non-real distinc-
tion is maintained between supposit and divine essence,
and then between the three supposita, can Aquinas maintain
orthodoxy. We make the following comments on Aquinas’
considerations concerning these three supposita.
Taking his cue from Aristotle,28 Aquinas argues that
knowledge can only come from the actual, not the potential,
and that proof that an intellect knows a thing is measured
by whether it has actualised (we might say ‘demonstrated’)
the thing. But God demonstrates Himself perfectly, thus he
knows Himself completely. Likewise, proof of capacity to
will a thing is measured by actualisation (we might say ‘pro-
duction’) of the thing. God produces Himself perfectly, and
so wills absolutely.29
Aquinas therefore reprises a version of his sua essentia
suum esse argument. The formal distinction between knowing
and willing breaks down in the self-actualisation of God. The
activity of thinking posits what is potentially God, and being
unlimited, this idea is perfectly conceived. The activity of
willing perfectly actualises that idea of God. There is thus no
part of the thought that is not realised in the volition. Formal
potentiality collapses into real actuality, and this movement
is the suppositive activity of being.
However, the internal structure of each supposit is still to
be distinguished. Unlike esse, nosse gives rise to a procession
in God named the Word (or the Son). Aquinas defines pro-
cession as ‘intelligible emanation’ which is not the object of
what is thought but the ‘intelligible word that proceeds from
the speaker but remains in him’.30 While Aquinas is keen to
deny that this emanation is anything like Aristotelean motion
or Neoplatonic irradiation, the negative reference to these
notions is still instructive. In my view Aquinas regards the
Word as a structured, organising activity according to what
is intended by the ‘speaker’.31 Like heat or motion, but at the
level of mind, the Word sets ideational entities in motion
in a determinate fashion. Aquinas speaks of a substance as
both a ‘subject’ and as ‘expressive of an intention’ that pro-
ceeds from the activity of God.32 By ‘expressive of intention’,
Aquinas means: ‘. . . by way of an intelligible emanation, for
example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the
speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith
30
understands procession as existing in God’ (ST I, q.27, a.1).
Aquinas clarifies his conception of procession according to a
doctrine of similarity:
For whenever we understand, by the very fact of under-

standing there proceeds something within us, which is a
conception of the object understood, a conception issuing
from our intellectual power and proceeding from our
knowledge of that object. This conception is signified by
the spoken word; and it is called the word of the heart
signified by the word of the voice. (ST I, q.27, a.1)
The difference from esse is that esse’s own activity is what is set
in motion once more (if we can speak of cycles of self-action),
whereas with procession the divine mind emanates an infi-
nite number of likenesses (unities) of its activity by means of
determinations of the first Idea Dei (the eternal ideas).33
Likewise, velle is structurally distinguished from esse and
nosse. Unlike esse and like nosse it is a procession, but unlike
nosse, velle is not generative.34 This latter distinction com-
prises a number of factors:35 First, to think is necessarily to
think being, and so the divine intellect has perfect knowledge
of God whose essence is being. Likewise, all things that think,
think being and so at least have a perfected knowledge of
being.
Volition is a different matter. One may posit a distinct
moment in which God’s action to actualise himself has not
yet terminated, and then argue that in its potentiality this
action wills perfection by achieving God, but such a hypothe-
sis Aquinas deems false.36 God perfects himself immediately,
and it is precisely in this virtus essendi that his perfection and
Goodness consists. Furthermore, we have seen that the power
of this perfection is not a power of the perfect to do something
it has not done, for then it would be imperfect; rather it is a
power which procures a different entity to act and so move
towards it. God’s will, as it were, is this perfected action
which draws others towards itself. Hence Aquinas says:
. . . although God wills things apart from Himself only

for the sake of the end, which is His own goodness, it
does not follow that anything else moves His will, except
31
His goodness. So, as He understands things apart from
Himself by understanding His own essence, so He wills
things apart from Himself by willing His own goodness.37
If the action of the divine will is transitive at all, it is because

the Good of the divine perfection is communicated to others,
but even this is brought about by God willing His own good-
ness, and thus by doing so in the presence of all things having
access to being.
Correspondingly, whereas the intellect proceeds by simili-
tude, generating that which is like the cause. The will pro-
ceeds by a kind of difference, in that it ‘inclines to the thing
willed . . . toward an object’. More specifically, the thought
proceeds by likeness because it moves to generate itself in
its objects. Will (and particularly Love), on the other hand,
moves towards that in an object which it recognises already
in itself.38 Accordingly, velle is a principle of selection from
the generations of nosse.
By working back from these structural differences between
the three supposita, and by taking the limit case in which each
activity is both subject and its own object, these distinctions
disappear in this reflexive result. The result, though, is not
the object of first philosophy; the theologian’s interest is the
suppositive activity that produces it: ‘Since God then is not
composed of matter and form, He must be His own Godhead,
His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated of Him’
(ST I, q.3, a.3).
I understand supposit then as an activity proceeding from
and expressive of an intension, that is, expressive of one of
the three designated activities of being, knowing or willing.
A final comment on the use of the term ‘supposit’. The
reason for the nomenclature is given in the already cited quo-
tation: it is an expressive name of an intention, where intention
means a stretching (teino) of will towards some end.39 When
this intention is rational, it is called a ‘person’.40 This sug-
gests a directed incorporeal activity. We will obtain a further
understanding though from the supposit’s use by Aquinas in
solving the problem of the divine persons. Aquinas considers
this objection: when I ask you what are the three things in
God, you respond ‘three persons’, which, the objection con-
tinues, can only be understood as three essences. In his reply,
32
Aquinas argues that the ‘What?’ question confuses two pos-
sible responses corresponding to the meanings of substance.
‘What?’ could mean ‘What is in God that defines God?’ to
which the answer is ‘the divine essence’. But ‘What?’ could
also mean ‘What acts or occurs in God?’, and the response
to this is ‘three persons’. Aquinas actually phrases this latter
point as ‘What swims in the sea? A fish’ but this is expressly
used to exemplify a suppositum and thus an intentional act.41
The sense of the example seems to be that we are not signify-
ing any particular fish, or even genus of fish, but indicating
the act of swimming in the sea and asking ‘What is it that
would act in the sea in this way, if not the sea-substance?’
It follows that when we speak of the divine persons, we are
asking ‘What acts in God?’ and not ‘What defines God?’ In
the latter case the unity of essential definition is assured, in
the former we can appreciate that there are three different
intensions or activities at work in God.
An alternative reading of Aquinas in the Leibniz literature?

In the foregoing I have departed from the interpretation given
by Brandon Look in his ‘Leibniz and the “vinculum sub-
stantiale” ’.42 For this purpose I am only interested in Look’s
account of Leibniz’s early and middle period views. While
an incredibly important topic, the doctrine of the vinculum
substantiale or substantial bond is explicitly developed in the
late period and thus falls outside the scope of this work. I
would agree with Look, however, that the earlier work to
be discussed below is highly instructive regarding Leibniz’s
direction of travel.
Now, Look argues that supposit means the individual
substance that combines matter and form, and that as God
is without matter, his supposit is equivalent to his form or
nature. In support Look cites a number of the articles of
the Summa discussed above and I let my reading speak for
itself: that (i) per Aubry, Aquinas starts from Aristotle’s own
abandonment of form and matter in favour of energeia and
dunamei; and (ii) that he regards the pure or perfect activity
of God as a ground of his power, a power which is expressed
as the supposita or divine persons. Look’s analysis – that sup-
posit is equivalent to nature – is apparently best represented
by Aquinas’ questions on the incarnation in ST Tertia Pars.
33
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in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely
one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems
to be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least
poetry of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts.
It is a long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If
America had not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no
longer, it will not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.”
Believing as he did, that human freedom could never last long in a
democracy, Ames thought that perhaps, when liberty had given
place to an emperor, this monarch might desire to see splendor in
his court, and to occupy his subjects with the cultivation of the arts
and sciences. At any rate, he maintained, “After some ages we shall
have many poor and a few rich, many grossly ignorant, a
considerable number learned, and a few eminently learned. Nature,
never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men of genius, who will
be admired and imitated.” The first part of this prophecy failed, but
the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite unexpected.
II
The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the

whole Federalist party of his day, was that there was already being
created on this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation, but a new
temperament. How far this temperament was to arise from a change
of climate, and how far from a new political organization, no one
could then foresee, nor is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact
itself is now coming to be more and more recognized. It may be that
Nature said, at about that time, “‘Thus far the English is my best
race; but we have had Englishmen enough; now for another turning
of the globe, and a further novelty. We need something with a little
more buoyancy than the Englishman: let us lighten the structure,
even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous
fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new range of
promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly
organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared
first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew
Arnold, who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a
species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a
physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against
overworking its children in school. In reality, it was a point of the
greatest importance. If Americans are to be merely duplicate
Englishmen, Nature might have said, the experiment is not so very
interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the
sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more toward
recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold himself, when he
afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the English],
with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal
wanting in lucidity and flexibility”; and again in the same essay, “The
whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say,
‘quick.’”[24] This would seem to yield the whole point between himself
and the American writer whom he had criticised, and who happened
to be the author of this present volume.
One of the best indications of this very difference of temperament,
even to this day, is the way in which American journalists and
magazinists are received in England, and their English compeers
among ourselves. An American author connected with the “St.
Nicholas Magazine” was told by a London publisher, within my
recollection, that the plan of the periodical was essentially wrong.
“The pages of riddles at the end, for instance,” he said, “no child
would ever guess them”; and although the American assured him
that they were guessed regularly every month in twenty thousand
families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As to the element
of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant New York talker
that he had dined through three English counties on the strength of
the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old American
“Farmer’s Almanac” which he had happened to put into his trunk
when packing for his European trip.
From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecœur, down to
Ampère and De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation,
denied to the English, of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems
to indicate that the change in the Anglo-American temperament had
already begun to show itself. Ampère especially notices what he
calls “une veine européenne” among the educated classes. Many
years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble, writing in reference to
the dramatic stage, pointed out that the theatrical instinct of
Americans created in them an affinity for the French which the
English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self-display, did not share,
she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French temperament,
while perhaps giving to it an inadequate explanation.
III
The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by

Franklin and Brockden Brown, and then to New York by Cooper and
Irving, was in each case too detached and fragmentary to create
more than these individual fames, however marked or lasting these
may be. It required time and a concentrated influence to constitute a
literary group in America. Bryant and Channing, with all their marked
powers, served only as a transition to it. Yet the group was surely
coming, and its creation has perhaps never been put in so compact
a summary as that made by that clear-minded ex-editor of the
“Atlantic Monthly,” the late Horace Scudder. He said, “It is too early
to make a full survey of the immense importance to American letters
of the work done by half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this
century. The body of prose and verse created by them is constituting
the solid foundation upon which other structures are to rise; the
humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the country, and no
material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional prosperity,
or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spiritual well-
being of the nation for generations to come.”
The geographical headquarters of this particular group was
Boston, of which Cambridge and Concord may be regarded for this
purpose as suburbs. Such a circle of authors as Emerson,
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Alcott, Thoreau, Parkman,
and others had never before met in America; and now that they have
passed away, no such local group anywhere remains: nor has the
most marked individual genius elsewhere—such, for instance, as
that of Poe or Whitman—been the centre of so conspicuous a
combination. The best literary representative of this group of men in
bulk was undoubtedly the “Atlantic Monthly,” to which almost every
one of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial
opening strength.
With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed
at that period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself
rapidly over the country, and in which most of the above authors took
some part and several took leading parts, these lectures having
much formative power over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous
among the lecturers also were such men as Gough, Beecher,
Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and lesser men who are now
collectively beginning to fade into oblivion. With these may be added
the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips and
Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to their
audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia
Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These
lectures were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source
of popular education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of
being rather suggestive than instructive, because they always came
in a detached way and so did not favor coherent thinking. The much
larger influence now exerted by courses of lectures in the leading
cities does more to strengthen the habit of consecutive thought than
did the earlier system; and such courses, joined with the great
improvement in public schools, are assisting vastly in the progress of
public education. The leader who most distinguished himself in this
last direction was, doubtless, Horace Mann, who died in 1859. The
influence of American colleges, while steadily maturing into
universities all over the country, has made itself felt more and more
obviously, especially as these colleges have with startling
suddenness and comprehensiveness extended their privileges to
women also, whether in the form of coeducation or of institutions for
women only.
For many years, the higher intellectual training of Americans was
obtained almost entirely through periods of study in Europe,
especially in Germany. Men, of whom Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell,
and Bancroft were the pioneers, beginning in 1818 or thereabouts,
discovered that Germany and not England must be made our
national model in this higher education; and this discovery was
strengthened by the number of German refugees, often highly
trained men, who sought this country for political safety. The
influence of German literature on the American mind was
undoubtedly at its highest point half a century ago, and the passing
away of the great group of German authors then visible was even
more striking than have been the corresponding changes in England
and America; but the leadership of Germany in purely scientific
thought and invention has kept on increasing, so that the mental tie
between that nation and our own was perhaps never stronger than
now.
In respect to literature, the increased tendency to fiction,
everywhere visible, has nowhere been more marked than in
America. Since the days of Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the recognized
leader in this department has been Mr. Howells; that is, if we base
leadership on higher standards than that of mere comparison of
sales. The actual sale of copies in this department of literature has
been greater in certain cases than the world has before seen; but it
has rarely occurred that books thus copiously multiplied have taken
very high rank under more deliberate criticism. In some cases, as in
that of Bret Harte, an author has won fame in early life by the
creation of a few striking characters, and has then gone on
reproducing them without visible progress; and this result has been
most apt to occur wherever British praise has come in strongly, that
being often more easily won by a few interesting novelties than by
anything deeper in the way of local coloring or permanent
delineation.
IV
It is sometimes said that there was never yet a great migration
which did not result in some new form of national genius; and this
should be true in America, if anywhere. He who lands from Europe
on our shores perceives a difference in the sky above his head; the
height seems greater, the zenith farther off, the horizon wall steeper.
With this result on the one side, and the vast and constant mixture of
races on the other, there must inevitably be a change. No portion of
our immigrant body desires to retain its national tongue; all races
wish their children to learn the English language as soon as
possible, yet no imported race wishes its children to take the British
race, as such, for models. Our newcomers unconsciously say with
that keen thinker, David Wasson, “The Englishman is undoubtedly a
wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies
of him do, for the present?” The Englishman’s strong point is his
vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation.
Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly
on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The
American’s disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall.
Washington Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French
observer as Chasles a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison,
wrote to John Lothrop Motley two years before his own death, “You
are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press,—that
rising tribunal before which the whole world is to be summoned, its
history to be revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past ages to
be canceled or confirmed.” For one who can look back sixty years to
a time when the best literary periodical in America was called “The
Albion,” it is difficult to realize how the intellectual relations of the two
nations are now changed. M. D. Conway once pointed out that the
English magazines, such as the “Contemporary Review” and the
“Fortnightly,” were simply circular letters addressed by a few
cultivated gentlemen to the fellow members of their respective
London clubs. Where there is an American periodical, on the other
hand, the most striking contribution may proceed from a previously
unknown author, and may turn out to have been addressed
practically to all the world.
So far as the intellectual life of a nation exhibits itself in literature,
England may always have one advantage over us,—if advantage it
be,—that of possessing in London a recognized publishing centre,
where authors, editors, and publishers are all brought together. In
America, the conditions of our early political activity have supplied us
with a series of such centres, in a smaller way, beginning, doubtless,
with Philadelphia, then changing to New York, then to Boston, and
again reverting, in some degree, to New York. I say “in some degree”
because Washington has long been the political centre of the nation,
and tends more and more to occupy the same central position in
respect to science, at least; while Western cities, notably Chicago
and San Francisco, tend steadily to become literary centres for the
wide regions they represent. Meanwhile the vast activities of
journalism, the readiness of communication everywhere, the
detached position of colleges, with many other influences,
decentralize literature more and more. Emerson used to say that
Europe stretched to the Alleghanies, but this at least has been
corrected, and the national spirit is coming to claim the whole
continent for its own.
There is undoubtedly a tendency in the United States to transfer
intellectual allegiance, for a time, to science rather than to literature.
This may be only a swing of the pendulum; but its temporary
influence has nowhere been better defined or characterized than by
the late Clarence King, formerly director of the United States
Geological Survey, who wrote thus a little before his death: “With all
its novel modern powers and practical sense, I am forced to admit
that the purely scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to
have become a splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible
automaton, grinding on with its analyses or constructions. But for
pure sentiment, for all that spontaneous, joyous Greek waywardness
of fancy, for the temperature of passion and the subtler thrill of
ideality, you might as well look to a wrought-iron derrick.”
Whatever charges can be brought against the American people,
no one has yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-
esteem; and though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the
philosophers agree that it is the only path to greatness. “The only
nations which ever come to be called historic,” says Tolstoi in his
“Anna Karenina,” “are those which recognize the importance and
worth of their own institutions.” Emerson, putting the thing more
tersely, as is his wont, says that “no man can do anything well who
does not think that what he does is the centre of the visible
universe.” The history of the American republic was really the most
interesting in the world, from the outset, were it only from the mere
fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a self-governing
people in a condition never before witnessed on the globe; and so to
this is now added the vaster contemplation of it as a nation of
seventy millions rapidly growing more and more. If there is no
interest in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to
build up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on
earth. The time will come when all men will wonder, not that
Americans attached so much importance to their national
development at this period, but that they appreciated it so little.
Canon Zincke has computed that in 1980 the English-speaking
population of the globe will number, at the present rate of progress,
one thousand millions, and that of this number eight hundred millions
will dwell in the United States. No plans can be too far-seeing, no
toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing this vast future
civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that we must view the
immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than fulfill the
generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel, “The House
with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all the
great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are
rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”
When one looks at the apparently uncertain, but really tentative
steps taken by the trustees of the Carnegie Institution at
Washington, one sees how much must yet lie before us in our
provisions for intellectual progress. The numerical increase of our
common schools and universities is perhaps as rapid as is best, and
the number of merely scientific societies is large, but the provision
for the publication of works of real thought and literature is still far too
small. The endowment of the Smithsonian Institution now extends
most comprehensively over all the vast historical work in American
history, now so widely undertaken, and the Carnegie Institution bids
fair to provide well for purely scientific work and the publication of its
results. But the far more difficult task of developing and directing
pure literature is as yet hardly attempted. Our magazines tend more
and more to become mainly picture-books, and our really creative
authors are geographically scattered and, for the most part,
wholesomely poor. We should always remember, moreover, what is
true especially in these works of fiction, that not only individual
books, but whole schools of them, emerge and disappear, like the
flash of a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you
have it. “The highways of literature are spread over,” said Holmes,
“with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at
a mouthful by the public, and is done with.”
In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now
to be found less among the poets than among the writers of prose
fiction. Of these younger authors, we have in America such men as
Winston Churchill, Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister,
Arthur S. Pier, and George Wasson; any one of whom may at any
moment surprise us by doing something better than the best he has
before achieved. The same promise of a high standard is visible in
women, among whom may be named not merely those of maturer
standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but her
younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and
Josephine Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid
steps, and is likely to be still more successful in such hands as those
of William Vaughn Moody, Ridgely Torrence, and Percy McKaye. The
leader of English dramatic criticism, William Archer, found within the
last year, as he tells us, no less than eight or nine notable American
dramas in active representation on the stage, whereas eight years
earlier there was but one.
Similar signs of promise are showing themselves in the direction of
literature, social science, and higher education generally, all of which
have an honored representative, still in middle life, in Professor
George E. Woodberry. Professor Newcomb has just boldly pointed
out that we have intellectually grown, as a nation, “from the high
school of our Revolutionary ancestors to the college; from the
college we have grown to the university stage. Now we have grown
to a point where we need something beyond the university.” What he
claims for science is yet more needed in the walks of pure literature,
and is there incomparably harder to attain, since it has there to deal
with that more subtle and vaster form of mental action which
culminates in Shakespeare instead of Newton. This higher effort,
which the French Academy alone even attempts,—however it may
fail in the accomplished results,—may at least be kept before us as
an ideal for American students and writers, even should its demands
be reduced to something as simple as those laid down by Coleridge
when he announced his ability to “inform the dullest writer how he
might write an interesting book.” “Let him,” says Coleridge, “relate
the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feeling that
accompanied them.”[25] Thus simple, it would seem, are the
requirements for a really good book; but, alas! who is to fulfill them?
Yet if anywhere, why not in America?
FOOTNOTES
[1] Outlook, October, 1907.
[2] Bancroft’s History of the United States, i, 247.
[3] E. W. Pierce’s Indian Biography.
[4] Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 158.
[5] Thatcher’s Lives of Indians, i, 119.
[6] Thatcher’s Lives of Indians, i, 120.
[7] Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 194.
[8] Belknap’s American Biography, ii, 214.
[9] Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 194, note.
[10] E. W. Pierce’s Indian Biography, 22.
[11] E. W. Pierce’s Indian Biography, 25.
[12] Sanborn and Harris’s Alcott, ii, 566.
[13] Emerson in Concord, 120.
[14] Sanborn and Harris’s Alcott, i, 264.
[15] Sanborn and Harris’s Alcott, i, 262.
[16] Sanborn and Harris’s Alcott, ii, 477.
[17] Memoirs, ii, 473.
[18] Address before the Alumni of Andover, 1.
[19] Address before the Alumni of Andover, 10.
[20] Address to Workingmen in Providence, April 11, 1886, p.
19.
[21] Lodge’s George Cabot, 12, note.
[22] Harvard Reminiscences, by Andrew Preston Peabody, D.
D., LL. D., p. 18.
[23] “Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste.” Études
sur la Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Américains, Paris,
1851.
[24] Nineteenth Century, xxii, 324, 319.
[25] Quarterly Review, xcviii, 456.
The Riverside Press

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Leibniz A Contribution to the

Archaeology of Power 1st Edition

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© Stephen Connelly, 2021

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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ISBN 978 1 4744 1806 5 (hardback)

The right of Stephen Connelly to be identified as the author of this

I would like to thank Tara Mulqueen for our long chats on

As readers of Leibniz are aware a critical edition of Leibniz’s

A: German Academy of Sciences (ed.) G.W. Leibniz: Sämtliche

Activity and power

(a) How does Leibniz reconfigure the classical divide

The challenge Leibniz sets for any archaeology of power is that

Each term draws on the radical ‘tension’ from the Italian

2. The divine activity

(a) For Aristotle activity (energeia) stands at the head of the

The argument of this work rests on the centrality of energeia,

BODY. WORLD TRINITY. MIND

As Maria Rosa Antognazza has noted,4 this sketch for the

(a) How is it possible that the three aspects of Leibnizian

The answers to these questions will clarify the central role

3.1 The distinctions and unity of Trinity. Mind

The metaphysical structure of the problem

The supposit in Aquinas

In one ­way . . . ­means the quiddity of a thing, signified by

In saying that one sense of substance is as an individual’s

. . . in things not composed of matter and form, in which

I would suggest that Aquinas has sought to resolve his the-

What the nature signifies includes only what belongs to

This move sets up the following hierarchy. Our basic struc-

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that

As we saw earlier, if wood is hot, its heat has been transferred

For whenever we understand, by the very fact of under-

. . . although God wills things apart from Himself only

If the action of the divine will is transitive at all, it is because

An alternative reading of Aquinas in the Leibniz literature?

The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the

The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by

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In one way . . . means the quiddity of a thing, signified by