ngen der k. saechs.
Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_, Leipsic, 1865, included in Hartenstein's
_Historisch-philosophische Abhandlungen_, 1870.]

By making sensation and feeling the preliminary step to thought, Leibnitz
became the founder of that intellectualism which, in the system of Hegel,
extended itself far beyond the psychological into the cosmical field, and
endeavored to conceive not only all psychical phenomena but all reality
whatsoever as a development of the Idea toward itself. This conception,
which may be characterized as intellectualistic in its content, presents
itself on its formal side as a quantitative way of looking at the world,
which sacrifices all qualitative antitheses in order to arrange the
totality of being and becoming in a single series with no distinctions but
those of degree. If Leibnitz here appears as the representative of a view
of the world which found in Kant a powerful and victorious opponent, yet,
on the other hand, he prepared the way by his conception of innate ideas
for the Critique of Reason. By his theory of knowledge he forms the
transition link between Descartes and Kant, since he interprets necessary
truths not as dwelling in the mind complete and explicit from the start,
but as produced or raised into consciousness only on the occasion of
sensuous experience. It must be admitted, moreover, that this in reality
was only a restoration of Descartes's original position, _i.e._, a
deliverance of it from the misinterpretations and perversions which it
had suffered at the hands of adherents and opponents alike, but which
Descartes, it is true, had failed to render impossible from the start by
conclusive explanations. The author of the theory of innate ideas certainly
did not mean what Locke foists upon him, that the child in the cradle
already possesses the ideas of God, of thought, and of extension in full
clearness. But whether Leibnitz improved or only restored Descartes, it was
in any case an important advance when experience and thought were brought
into more definite relation, and the productive force in rational concepts
was secured to the latter and the occasion of their production to the
former.

The unconscious or minute ideas, which in noetics had served to break the
force of Locke's objections against the innateness of the principles of
reason, are in ethics brought into the field against indeterminism. They
are involved whenever we believe ourselves to act without caus