This late piece contains a number of disconnected but characteristic observations on charity, honor, virtue, the doctrines of Aristotle and Hobbes, and other subjects which have a bearing on Leibniz' politics. Only those few passages having such a bearing are included here. (The original text is to be found in vol. V of Dutens' edition.)

1. The Letter on Enthusiasm contains a thousand beautiful thoughts: and I believe that raillery is a good protection against this vice; but I do not find it at all suitable for curing people of it. On the contrary, the contempt which is enveloped in raillery will be taken by them as affliction and persecution. I have remarked that when one rails at errors and absurdities in religious matters, one irritates infinitely the people who are favorably inclined toward it [religion], and that this is the true way to pass for an atheist in their minds. I don't know, either, whether the use of ridicule is a good touchstone, for the best and most important things can be turned to ridicule; and it is not always certain that truth will have those who laugh on its side, being most often hidden from vulgar eyes. I have already said that all raillery contains a little contempt; and it is not just that one try to make contemptible that which does not deserve it.

Division of our Author's Introduction

1. The subject of this examination, is a passage contained in that part of Sir W. Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which the Author has styled the Introduction. This Introduction of his stands divided into four Sections. The first contains his discourse ‘On the Studyof the Law’. The second, entitled ‘Of the Nature of Lawsin general’, contains his speculations concerning the various objects, real or imaginary, that are in use to be mentioned under the common name of Law. The third, entitled ‘Of the Laws of England’, contains such general observations, relative to these last mentioned Laws, as seemed proper to be premised before he entered into the details of any parts of them in particular. In the fourth, entitled, ‘Of the Countriessubject to the Laws of England’, is given a statement of the different territorial extents of different branches of those Laws.

What part of it is here to be examined

2. 'Tis in the second of these sections, that we shall find the passage proposed for examination. It occupies in the edition I happen to have before me, which is the first (and all the editions, I believe, are paged alike) the space of seven pages; from the 47th, to the 53d, inclusive.

This relatively early work (1679) was written for Johann Friedrich of Hanover (d. 1679) in the ‘mirror of princes’ style. Modelled partly on Pliny's Panegyricus, written for Trajan, the more fulsome and extravagant praises of Duke Johann are offset by a number of interesting passages on the proper education of princes, on the kinds of virtues which they ought to cultivate, which become particularly important when one recalls that Leibniz favored relatively absolute concentrated power and had to rely on princely virtue as the only check to arbitrary rule. The Portrait reveals Leibniz' extraordinarily wide acquaintance with classical writers, and contains a passage on the nature of justice which is, in many ways, his most radical pronouncement on that subject. (The original text is contained in vol. IV of Klopp's edition.)

Since the order of states is founded on the authority of those who govern them, and on the dependence of peoples, nature, which destines men for civil life, causes them to be born with different qualities, some to command, others to obey, so that the power of sovereigns in monarchies, and the inequality of those who command and those who obey in republics, are founded no less in nature than in law, and in virtue than in fortune: thus princes must be above their subjects by their virtue, and by their natural qualities, as they are above them by the authority which the laws give them to reign according to natural law and civil law – just as the first kings of the world, who, having been elevated to the governance of peoples through their virtue and their intellectual advantages, commanded as much by nature as by law, and by merit as by fortune.

THE TEXT

General. The attempt here is to present Locke's ‘text for posterity’ (see above, pp. 9–11) from the Christ's corrected copy. It has been set up in type from a photograph of that document. The compositors have in fact worked from printer's copy prepared for the press between 1698 and 1704 by Locke himself and by Coste. Locke's hand appears only occasionally after the first few pages, and Coste seems to have been copying rather than taking his dictation: it seems possible that he may have been copying from another, very similar exemplar, the hypothetical second master-copy which is discussed below.

The decision to reproduce the Christ's copy, modified only in such particulars as were absolutely necessary, was the simplest, most consistent solution to an intricate editorial problem. The reader has before him the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death, or something as close to that version as the editor can make it. He has also a record, complete in all essentials, but not absolutely exhaustive, of all the variants from that final version which were seen by Locke, and then rejected by him at one correcting stage or other.

Documents used. In order to appreciate why the editor has ventured to alter the Christ's copy in any way whatsoever, it is necessary to record the documents from which he has worked.

These three pieces, two of them written in the year before Leibniz' death, show both his continued interest in his own desire for a resuscitation of the Republic of Christendom, and a new sense of rather sad amusement about the possibility of such a scheme's being effected. In his letter to the Abbé de St Pierre himself, he is cordial and even flattering; in his Observations on the Project he is more critical, and faults the Abbé's defective knowledge of German history, recommending (again) a reformed Papacy and Empire as the foundations of European peace. And in his letter to Grimarest (1712), he is in a playful (but serious) mood, suggesting that his own ‘romances’ are as good as St Pierre's. (The letter to St Pierre and the Observations are contained in vol. 4 of Foucher de Careil's edition; the letter to Grimarest, only part of which is reproduced here, is to be found in vol. V of Dutens' edition.)

LETTER TO THE ABBÉ DE ST PIERRE (February 1715)

I consider myself highly honored by the receipt of your project, and by the request which you make of my opinion about a matter which interests the whole human race, and which is not entirely outside my range of interests, since I have since my youth applied myself to law, and particularly to that of nations.

In his own copy of the Fragment on Government, Jeremy Bentham made the handwritten note that ‘this was the very first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammels of authority and ancestor-wisdom on the field of law’. It is a young man's book. It is a fresh book, fresh with energy, ideas, and hope. It is a critical book, surveying the established and uncongenial world and determined to show how it might do better. The legal and political world is to be constructed anew from first principles. As Bentham noted in a manuscript written shortly after the Fragment, he had found, on commencing study of the law, ‘the various rights and duties of the various classes of mankind jumbled together in one immense and unsorted heap: men ruined for not knowing what they are neither enabled nor permitted to learn: and the whole fabric of jurisprudence a labyrinth without a clew’. The only way he saw to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ was ‘to pour in a body of severe and steady criticism and to spread it over the whole extent of the subject in one comprehensive unbroken tide’. So the current state of the law he took to be a mass of filth – in another place he commented that training in the law was like being asked to roll in the contents of a night cart – and this all had to be flushed away by new thought and new criticism.

LOCKE AND OXFORD

John Locke lived from 1632 to 1704, from the seventh year of the reign of Charles I to the third year of the reign of Queen Anne: 1632 was the year of the birth of Sir Christopher Wren in England, of Pufendorf and Spinoza on the continent. In the course of his seventy-two years Locke saw the worlds in which he spent his life, the intellectual and scientific world, the political and economic world, change farther and faster than any of his forefathers had done, and in England more markedly than anywhere else. He was as much of a mere Englishman as a universal genius could be, though he spent two critical periods of his life abroad, in France from 1675 to 1679 and in Holland from 1683 to 1689. He was as private and ordinary a man as could be expected of an individual who was to help to change the philosophical and political assumptions of Europe, but for two other periods he was a directive political influence in his own right and something of a public personality. This was between about 1667 and 1675 and again in 1679–82 when he was associated with that overpowering political leader, the first earl of Shaftesbury, and between 1694 and 1700 as the confidant of Lord Somers, the chief figure of the government. He died a famous man and he has remained one of the great English names ever since.

When men think of themselves as organized with each other they must remember who they are. They do not make themselves, they do not own themselves, they do not dispose of themselves, they are the workmanship of God. They are his servants, sent into the world on his business, they are even his property (ii, § 6). To John Locke this was a proposition of common sense, the initial proposition of a work which appeals to common sense throughout. It is an existentialist proposition, which men have not thought it worth while to question seriously until our own day, and it relies not so much on the proved existence of a Deity as upon the possibility of taking what might be called a synoptic view of the world, more vulgarly a God's-eye view of what happens among men here on earth. If you admit that it is possible to look down on men from above, then you may be said to grant to Locke this initial position.

From this common-sense starting-point he proceeds to two inferences, that we are all free and we are all equal; free of each other, that is to say, and equal to each other, for we are not free of God's superiority and not equal to him. If God could be shown to have given any man, or any order of men, superiority over other men, then these inferences could not be drawn.