Der junge Leibniz. Vol. 2 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 371 elaborating a science based upon it. What the Scientific Revolution of the t7th century accomplished was this new science. But the methodology employed was one which in its essentials had already been elaborated centuries before. This goes beyond Duhem in its conception of medieval science as anticipation. It is a fascinating thesis, one that challenges most recent work on the historiography of this period. I do not think it is sustained, but there can be no doubt that Dr. Maier has done more than has any other scholar to force us to look at the natural philosophy of the 14th century with new eyes and a new interest. ERNAN McMuLLIN University of Notre Dame K. Moll. Der junge Leibniz. Voi. 2. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982. Pp. 214. The present work is the second' in a projected three-part series of monographs on what their author calls Leibniz's "first sketch of a system." The Leibnizian text consists of two letters written by the youthful Leibniz to his former teacher, Jakob Thomasius, the first in 1668, the second in 1669. The first letter takes up a scant three pages in the Academy edition of Leibniz's writings; 2 the second is eleven pages. 3 Thus the systematic element is sketchy at best. However, the two letters do reveal the issues in in natural philosophy (Aristotelianism, atomism, materialism) with which Leibniz was preoccupied and suggest solutions which foreshadow and illuminate his later monadological system. Like its predecessor, which dealt with the influence of another of Leibniz's teachers, Erhard Weigel, upon the Leibniz of this period, the present study is also historical in nature and attempts to trace the influence of Pierre Gassendi's Syntagvna Philosophicum (1658). It is an important contribution to contemporary Leibniz scholarship for two reasons. First, familiarity with Gassendi's philosophical positions, even among historians of seventeenth century thought, is below the level which Gassendi's influence upon his contemporaries would justify. Second, it is tempting to force certain aspects of the early natural philosophy of Leibniz into a Cartesian mold, if one is not aware of the more natural and direct connections with Gassendi. In both these respects, Moll does a very creditable job of restoring the balance. The young Leibniz, like the mature one, was concerned with overcoming the threefold problem of the material continuum, which he felt arose for any atomistic natural philosophy. It was difficult or impossible for the atomist to explain the composition of bodies, their locomotion, and their cohesion (Moll, 121). Again, as in his later thought, the early Leibniz recognized that more was necessary in natural The first is Derjunge Leibniz.Vol. 1. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978. G. W. Leibniz: SitmtlicheSchriften und Briefe. Reihe II. Vo|. 1 (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1926), 12-14. 3 Ibid., 14-24. 379 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:3 JULY 1984 philosophy than atoms and the trio of "elementary qualities"--magnitude, figure, and motion--which were the foundational concepts of atomistic physics, and he attempted even here to incorporate the Aristotelian conception of substance within a purely mechanical (but no longer atomistic) physics (172 et passim). While Leibniz borrows from Gassendi the image of a corpuscular, mechanical physics, characterized essentially only by the elementary qualities, he departs from Gassendi by limiting the applicability of this image to the characterization of matter alone, and by considering materia prima as essentially a divisible continuum, not an actual set of atoms (144f). Elementary bodies are now to be considered as substances, where the notion of substance, in turn, is won through the geometrization of matter in the following sense. The Aristotelian "substantial form" is thefigure of a material body, arising from the activity of the divine Mens in passive matter (1ol). In this way Leibniz hopes to offer a mechanistically legitimate gloss on the mysterious tenet of Aristotelian scholasticism: "Forma educitur ex potentia materiae" (131 f). One's reading of this monograph is facilitated by lengthy quotations from the relevant texts, which make frequent recourse to the originals unnecessary. Moll's usual practice of providing translations of Leibniz's rather difficult Latin will be welcomed by most readers, though...