Sketch of a History

Ink splotches obscure parts of words in the lower half of the page.

...[breadth of thi]s entire line of thought, which both Spinoza and Leibniz, each in his own way, utilized and adjusted. Leibniz could perhaps even have dispensed with the matter, for in doing so he had already abandoned the simple fact that constitutes the problem—namely, that the world is given to us immediately only as our representationGerman: Vorstellung. For Schopenhauer, this refers to the world as it exists in our minds through our senses, not the world as it is in itself.—in order to substitute for it the dogma of a world of bodies and a world of spirits, between which no bridge is possible. He did this by conflating the question of the relationship of representations to things-in-themselves with that of the possibility of the movements of the body by the will, and then solving both together through his pre-established harmonyoriginal: "harmonia praestabilita". Leibniz's theory that God synchronized the "clocks" of the soul and the body at the start of time so they appear to interact without actually doing so. (See New System of Nature, in Works of Leibniz, edited by Erdmann, p. 125. — Brucker, History of Philosophy, Vol. IV, Part II, p. 425).

The monstrous absurdity of his assumption was already brought into the clearest light by some of his contemporaries, especially BaylePierre Bayle (1647–1706), a skeptical philosopher whose critiques of rationalist systems were highly influential., by demonstrating the consequences flowing from it. (See, in Leibniz's Shorter Works, translated by Huth in the year 1740, the note to p. 79, in which Leibniz himself finds himself forced to set forth the revolting consequences of his assertion.) Nevertheless, it is precisely the absurdity of the assumption to which a thinking mind was driven by the problem at hand that proves its magnitude, its difficulty, and its perplexity—and how little one can resolve it by mere denial, as has been attempted in our own day, and thus "cut the knot."

Spinoza starts again directly from Descartesoriginal: "Cartesius". René Descartes (1596–1650), the "father of modern philosophy" who famously divided reality into mind and matter.: therefore, appearing initially as a Cartesian, he retained the dualism of his teacher; accordingly, he posited a thinking substanceoriginal: "substantia cogitans" and an extended substanceoriginal: "substantia extensa", the former as subjectOCR reads "Objekt" (object) here, but in the context of Cartesian dualism, the thinking substance is the subject; this is likely a transcription error or slip of the pen., the latter as the object of knowledge. Later, however, when he stood on his own feet, he found that both were one and the same substance, viewed from different sides—that is, at one time as extended substance and at the other as thinking substance...

The formal being of ideas recognizes God as a cause, insofar as He is considered only as a thinking thing, and not insofar as He is explained by another attribute. That is, the ideas of both the attributes of God and of individual things do not recognize the objects of the ideas themselves, or the things perceived, as their efficient cause; but rather God Himself, insofar as He is a thinking thing.original Latin: "Esse formale idearum Deum, quatenus tantum ut res cogitans consideratur, pro causa agnoscit, et non quatenus alio attributo explicatur. Hoc est, tam Dei attributorum, quam rerum singularium ideae non ipsa ideata, sive res perceptas pro causa efficiente agnoscunt; sed ipsum Deum, quatenus est res cogitans." This is a central tenet from Spinoza’s Ethics, Part II, Proposition 5, arguing that the chain of ideas is independent of the chain of physical objects.