* This and other page references are to: Leibniz Selections, ed. P. P. Wiener.

¹ Miss Hidé Ishiguro has observed to me that it would be very odd if Leibniz had thought that his innate ideas could be put to this use since he himself calls them common notions which would clearly unfit them for this purpose. Yet Leibniz does appear to be attracted to such a view of their function when he says (p. 374):—

“Is our soul then such a blank that, besides the images imprinted from without, it is nothing? This is not an opinion (I am sure) which our judicious author can approve. For we never see a surface perfectly even and uniform.”

By itself we might think Leibniz is here making no more than a dull empirical point, but the passage is too closely reminiscent of a similar one in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence on the subject of indiscernible leaves (p. 228), where another empirical observation is adduced in support of what Leibniz takes as a necessary truth.

² If Leibniz is taken to espouse the Identity of Indiscernibles for monadic predicates independently of relational predicates then he will naturally not be able to distinguish the record sheet of one mind from that of another by differences in the mechanism and modes of function of the two minds. And one might think that taken strictly the Identity of Indiscernibles does force him to stock the mind with ideas (or records) from the start. But this would be false, for if two minds contain no records we don't have to distinguish between the records each holds; we simply say there are none.

³ Unfortunately we here run up against one of the (many) incoherencies of the model. For if an idea is innate (2) its object must not have been acquired by the senses. Yet in the example I have used one takes it that the object of the concept knowledge is the knowledge I have. And that may have been acquired by the senses. The trouble comes with trying to construe the concept knowledge as a sort of imprint of an imprint we already have in the store of the mind, and this won't do at all. The example however does, I think, accord with the sort of thing Leibniz had in mind.

⁴ I here use a semi-Cartesian test of truth for Locke's propositions partly out of respect for Leibniz's own attachment to connecting the two and partly because once Locke makes it impossible ever to compare the world with the ideas he has of it no other test suggests itself. I do not imply that Locke ever formulated such a criterion; indeed Essay IV. v.5 makes plain that he held a correspondence theory of one sort or another.

⁵ There is indeed a way of construing some of the things that Quine has to say about the grounds of necessity along the lines of Remedy (iii). But he, unlike Leibniz, is prepared to call in question the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, and for that reason it would seem inappropriate to attribute such a theory to Leibniz in full conscience.

⁶ An interesting related study is that of Rescher, N.: A New Look at the Problem of Innate Ideas. Brit. J. Phil. Sci. (1966), Vol. 17, pp. 205–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar