LEIBNIZ AND IMMANENTISM

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2021.

The Immanentism of Leibniz’s Innatist Rationalism. The foundational error of the system
of innatist-rationalist monadism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) lies in his rejection of
metaphysical realism/methodical realism/moderate realism1 (which affirm an immediate
intentional contact with the extra-mental, real sensible things or beings of the external world), in
favor of an adherence to the principle of immanence, which methodologically locks one up in
one’s mind, one’s states of consciousness, unable to reach extra-mental sensible reality (extra-
mental, real, sensible things being the starting point2 for the valid a posteriori quia effect to
cause demonstrations of the existence of God employing analogical, metaphysical efficient
causality), in spite of Leibniz’s intentions to the contrary (e.g., his affirmations concerning pre-
established harmony and the existence of God, author of this pre-established harmony), an
adherence to the principle of immanence, an erroneous and destructive gnoseological principle
which historically culminated in the immanentism of agnostic Humean pan-phenomenalism, the
immanentism of agnostic Kantian transcendental idealism, and the immanentism of pantheistic-
monistic Hegelian absolute idealism, formulations of the principle of immanence which in turn
paved the way for the various forms of militant philosophical atheism from the middle to the end
of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. William Turner writes that “in
the Nouveaux essais, Leibniz maintains that all our ideas are innate. He teaches that the soul has
‘no doors or windows’ on the side facing the external world, that, consequently, all our
knowledge is developed from germs of thought which are innate. The innateness of our ideas is,

1
For gnoseological works defending metaphysical realism/methodical realism/moderate realism against the
principle of immanence and varieties of immanentism (e.g., rationalist, empiricist, immaterialist-idealist, pan-
phenomenalist, transcendental idealist, absolute idealist), see: J. J. SANGUINETI, Logic and Gnoseology,
Urbaniana University Press, Rome, 1987 (Italian original edition: Logica e gnoseologia, Pontificia Università
Urbaniana, Rome, 1983) ; A. LLANO, Gnoseology, Sinag-Tala, Manila, 2001 (Italian edition: Filosofia della
conoscenza, Le Monnier, Florence, 1987 ; Spanish edition: Gnoseología, EUNSA, Pamplona, 1991) ; R.
CORAZÓN GONZÁLEZ, Filosofía del conocimiento, EUNSA, Pamplona, 2002 ; J. J. SANGUINETI, Introduzione
alla gnoseologia, Le Monnier, Florence, 2003 ; J. J. SANGUINETI, El conocimiento humano: una perspectiva
filosófica, Ediciones Palabra, Madrid, 2005 ; É. GILSON, Methodical Realism, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2011 ;
É. GILSON, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2012.
2
An authentic a posteriori quia effect to cause demonstration of the existence of God must have a realist starting
point in extra-mental sensible reality, must start from some sensible datum in extra-mental reality as required
sensible evidence and must utilize objective metaphysical causality as a constitutive element of the proof (Cf. É.
GILSON, Thomism. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a translation of the 1965 sixth and final French edition by
L. Shook and A. Maurer, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 2002, p. 83). Étienne Gilson explains
that “a truly Thomistic proof of the existence of God always starts from some thing or situation empirically given in
sense knowledge. Only from an actually given existence can one legitimately infer a nonempirically given existence.
For instance, change is a fact given in sense experience; actual being likewise is a fact given in sense
experience.”(É. GILSON, Elements of Christian Philosophy, Mentor-Omega, New York, 1963, p. 61). “We must
start from a consideration of sensible things.”(É. GILSON, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas,
Random House, New York, 1956, p. 74). “Each proof (of St. Thomas Aquinas’ five ways) is based on the empirical
observation of a fact, because no existence can be inferred save by starting from some other existence…There is
motion, there are reciprocal actions, beings are born and die, things more or less perfect, and there is order in things.
And it is because all this is that we can affirm that its cause exists. The presence, then, of an existential base is a first
characteristic common to the five proofs for the existence of God.”(É. GILSON, op. cit., p. 76). “A second
characteristic trait is that they all make use of the causal inference.”(Ibid.).

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however, implicit rather than explicit (virtual innatism).”3 “L’innatismo è ripreso da Leibniz per
cui, in ultima analisi, tutte le idee sono innate, anche le rappresentazioni sensibili. Ma l’essere
innate è solo virtuale e l’intelletto attualizza le idee che porta in sé con una spontaneità che
costituisce il fondo della sua natura.”4 Noting the immanentist idealism of the rationalist
Leibniz, F.-J. Thonnard writes that “Leibniz can be said to be more idealist than either Descartes
or Spinoza. While the view of pre-established harmony, like a ‘deus ex machina,’ safeguards the
objective reality of the world and of its order, our monad-soul knows only its subjective
modifications and its ideas, which is sheer idealism. Furthermore, the theory of simple monads
deprives the ideas of extension and of space of any objective value. Thus, despite an attempt in
favor of traditional philosophy, Leibniz actually developed the idealistic germs of Cartesianism,
favoring the unity of ‘thought’ to the detriment of extension.”5 Benignus Gerrity likewise notes
the immanentist idealism of Leibniz, stating that “Leibniz did not even pretend that the mind in
any way gets extra-mental reality into itself; all knowledge is purely internal. The self-conscious
monad which, according to Leibniz, is the human soul, represents all the other monads which
make up the world, but this representation, which is knowledge, is not the result of any
interaction between the mind and external things or of any presence of external things to the
mind for every monad is perfectly self-contained and interacts with no other. The mind’s
representations correspond with – i.e., represent – the external world of the other monads,
because God had created all monads in ‘pre-established harmony.’”6 James Daniel Collins
explains the immanentism of Leibniz’s innatist gnoseological rationalism, writing that “the
theory of monads obliges Leibniz to take a definite position concerning certain epistemological
issues. In the debate between Descartes and Locke over the origin of ideas, he sides with the
former. Since monads are basically independent of each other, there can be no abstraction of
knowledge, in the sense of an abstractive derivation of ideas from the outside world. Their only
possible source is from the monad itself and, ultimately, from the creator of the monadic nature.
The simplicity of the finite monad is a dynamic, fecund one, spontaneously giving birth to all the
ideas and actions constituting its temporal experience. This conclusion is confirmed by the
logical doctrine on the complete individual substance. Since the notion of the individual contains
within itself all the predicates belonging to the thing, the real substance must be equipped, from
the outset, with the active tendency to bring forth the ideal content of its various states of
consciousness. By ‘innate idea,’ Leibniz means not only the meaning-content but also the
intellectual power and impulse to express this content and thus to know the object of perception.7
Innate ideas, in this plenary sense, are in the mind by the very fact that the mind is a dynamic
inclination to bring forth the essential content of thought, in an orderly and appropriate way.

3
W. TURNER, History of Philosophy, Ginn and Company, Boston, 1929, p. 510.
4
R. VERNEAUX, Epistemologia generale, Paideia, Brescia, 1967, p. 56.
5
F.-J. THONNARD, A Short History of Philosophy, Desclée, Tournai, 1956, p. 564.
6
BENIGNUS, Nature, Knowledge, and God, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1947, p. 293.
7
“Our soul has the power of representing to itself any form or nature whenever the occasion comes for thinking
about it, and I think that this activity of our soul is, so far as it expresses some nature, form or essence, properly the
idea of the thing. This is in us, and is always in us, whether we are thinking of it or no.”(G. W. LEIBNIZ, Discourse
on Metaphysics, XXVI (Wiener, 327); cf. What is an Idea? (Wiener, 281-283). Against Malebranche, Leibniz insists
that the idea is in the soul and not in God; but against Locke, he insists that the idea is in the soul at all times and not
merely during conscious perception. Cf. L. E. LOEMKER, Leibniz’s Doctrine of Ideas, “The Philosophical
Review,”55 (1946), pp. 229-248.

2
 “Leibniz repeats the Scholastic axiom that there is nothing in the intellect which was not
first in the sense – but he adds the significant qualification that the intellect itself does not have a
sensory origin.8 Under the term intellect, he includes not only the power of understanding but
also the primary ideas (such as substance, being, possibility, cause, perception, and identity) and
the first principles, based upon these primary ideas. Hence the intellect is not, as Locke
maintains, an unmarked tablet that must wait upon sense experience for its first traces. It is
already preformed with dispositions and aptitudes, both active and passive. Ideas and principles
are inbornly present in the understanding, in at least a virtual way. Whereas Locke limits the
presence of ideas to those that are actually being experienced or that are memories of past
experiences, Leibniz widens the meaning of the mental presence of ideas to include the active
capacity to bring them forth from the mind, through the native vigor of its immaterial dynamism.
The acquisition of knowledge means the passage of ideas and principles from a virtual to an
actual state of being known.

“Since ‘intellect’ is such an important exception to the sense origin of knowledge,

Leibniz must specify the way in which any knowledge is due to the senses. Here, the distinction
between truths of reason and truths of fact can be given a new significance. Necessary truths of
reason are known by the mind, operating in an independent and purely intellectual way. It can
summon forth the ideas and principles constituting these truths, without invoking outside aid and
in sole reliance upon its own natural light. Truths of fact, however, do require sense experience
in order to be distinctly apprehended. Sensation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for
grasping truths of fact. It provides the occasion for this knowledge but does not serve as its strict
cause. The ideas comprising a truth of fact are drawn from the mind, on the occasion of a sense
experience. The function of the latter is only to arouse the mind’s attention concerning some
particular connection of ideas, and thus to urge the mind to bring its own ideas to a state of
distinct awareness.9 It is not the truth or meaning-content itself but only our mental act of
thinking about the truth which requires a sensory occasion. The actual, empirical perceiving of
the meaning-content may be excited through some external expression of a connection which
arouses the understanding to advert to a similar (but, until now, unattended) connection among
its own ideas. But although our thoughts about truths of fact require sense experience, the truths
themselves are of innate origin. They fulfill the definition of an innate truth, namely, one whose
entire causal source lies in the understanding.

“Three questions immediately come to mind, with respect to this innatist view of
knowledge. Why does Leibniz want to reduce the scope of sensation so drastically; what
meaning can be given to sensation in a monadic context; what guarantees the objectivity of
knowledge, since sensation plays no genuinely causal role?

“1. In discussing the hierarchy among monads, Leibniz has already stated that minds or
rational souls are distinguished by their ability to apprehend necessary truths of essence or
8
“Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus.” G. F. LEIBNIZ, New Essays
Concerning Human Understanding, II, i, 2 (Langley, 111). The first book of Leibniz’s New Essays, like the first
book of Locke’s own Essay, is entirely devoted to the problem of innatism and is the major source for this aspect of
Leibniz’s doctrine.
9
Cf. G. W. LEIBNIZ, Discourse on Metaphysics, XXVII (Wiener, 329). On the anti-Lockean distinction between
the content of truth and the actual considering of that content by the mind, cf. Specimen of Thoughts Upon the First
Book of the Essay on Human Understanding (Langley, 21).

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eternal verities. This is the mark of the distinctively spiritual level of monadic life, where the
human self is found. Hence Leibniz does not want to compromise, in any way, the
characteristically human ability to have distinct knowledge of truths of reason, upon which the
sciences themselves depend. Since he is fortified by no realistic conviction that our minds can
reach things directly and can make abstraction of their necessary and essential structures, he has
no confidence in an experiential origin of knowledge, in which the senses make a real
contribution. His historical referent, in this instance, is Locke. Since Locke’s empirical
explanation for the universal and necessary aspects of knowledge fails to satisfy him, Leibniz
despairs entirely of finding a source in sense experience for them. Hence his historical position,
as well as his general metaphysics of substance, forces him to depreciate the senses and to rule
out any abstractive origin of first principles and necessary truths.

“2. But in reducing sensation to the position of a mere occasion of knowledge, Leibniz
nevertheless does not eliminate it entirely, especially with respect to existential truths of
contingent fact. Indeed, it is one of his basic theses that the finite mind must have a certain area
of confused perception and hence a certain measure of knowledge affected by sensation.10 Since
the substantial being of every mind is structurally proportioned to the rest of the universe, the
proper object of perception is the universe in its infinite variety. But the finite nature of our mind
prevents it from reducing this object to a perfect unity of rational order. Our limited attention is
directed now toward one sector of the universe and now toward the other, bringing some
particular objects of perception to clear and distinct knowledge, but leaving a wide area of
peripheral objects in the condition of confused perception or sensation. Sensation and intellection
do not differ in kind but they do differ in degree of clarity and distinctness. With respect to
purely intellectual knowledge, the mind is relatively active and autonomous, whereas in
sensation it is passive and dependent upon occasions furnished by other monads, especially
bodily monads. Although knowledge of contingent truths is not derived from the outside world,
the indispensable function of the latter is to direct the attention of the mind upon hitherto unseen
mental relations. Sensation, then, signifies the mind’s condition of passion and confused
perception, which compels it to have regard for the determinate state of the body and the rest of
the universe. This is a large concession to empiricism and the given character of our knowledge
of matters of fact. Yet Leibniz never concedes any authentic reception of the content of
knowledge from the world. Both his metaphysical analysis of action and passion, and his
assumption that a cognitive operation is not truly intellectual if it has any potential and receptive
phase, stand in the way of recognizing the full extent of the dependence of the human intellect
upon the actual world revealed by sense.

“3. Leibniz is supremely confident that his innatism and deduction of sense experience to
the status of an occasion will not lead to subjectivism. The ground of his confidence is not an
empirical study of cognition but an a priori, metaphysical certainty. ‘God has from the first
created the soul or any other real unity in such a way that everything arises in it from its own
internal nature through a perfect spontaneity relatively to itself, and yet with a perfect conformity
to external things…And this nature of the soul being representative of the universe in a very

10
G. W. LEIBNIZ, Discourse on Metaphysics, XXXIII (Wiener, 338-339). The need for senses, observation, and
hypothesis is stressed by A. H. JOHNSON, Leibniz’s Method and the Basis of His Metaphysics, “Philosophy,” 35
(1960), pp. 51-61, against B. Russell’s purely logical derivation.

4
exact though more or less distinctive manner, the series of representations produced in the soul
will correspond naturally to the series of changes in the Universe itself.’11

“This teaching on the natural conformity of our representations with the world is merely
an epistemological consequence of the pre-established harmony among substances. For the
cognitive operations share in the substance’s correspondence-to-the-universe, which is the
condition under which alone any essence is realized, both in its substance and its activities. Our
ideas arise spontaneously or innately from within ourselves, but the requirements of universal
harmony guarantee that they are in natural conformity with the being of the objects perceived.
Hence every monad is a reliable, living mirror of the world.12 Leibniz’s answer to the Lockean
query about how we can ever be sure that our ideas – which both thinkers admit to be the
immediate objects of perception – conform with real things, is that the question can never be
settled at the finite and empirical level. We must turn to the harmonizing Deity and to the even
more fundamental metaphysics of essential systems of perfection, for complete assurance that
the spontaneity and real conformity of our ideas are the graven laws of mental life.

“Berkeley will accept this way of settling the epistemological problem, but it will prove
unsatisfactory to both Hume and Kant. Hume’s difficulty is that the use of God as the guarantor
of the conformity of our ideas with things is invalid, since the arguments for God’s existence
already suppose the objective conformity of our ideas. Furthermore, the distinction between
necessary truths of reason and contingent truths of fact runs deeper than Leibniz suspects.
Empirically viewed, the mind requires the senses to provide literal data – given contents – and
not merely occasions for intellectual reminiscence or introspection. The fact that necessary truths
concern the essential order, whereas contingent truths concern matters of existence, is also
indicative of a wider cleavage than Leibniz is willing to admit. Once Hume realizes the
distinctiveness of the existential order and its resistance to reduction to the status of a mere
culmination of an essential dialectic, he can point out that the existence of God is not established
through an analysis of essential requirements and that the metaphysics of harmonizing essences
may not be relevant for questions about existential matter of fact. Consequently, he can reject the
two pillars underlying Leibniz’s confidence in the natural conformity between his ideas and the
actual world. The stage will then be prepared for Kant’s tremendous effort to synthesize the
Leibnizian world of necessary, universal truths of essence and the Humean world of contingent,
existential facts, without making appeal to God and a metaphysic of essences.”13

11
G. W. LEIBNIZ, New System of Nature and of the Communication of Substances, 14, 15 (Wiener, 114-115).
12
Cf. G. W. LEIBNIZ, Letters to Clarke, V, 87 (Wiener, 267); G. F. LEIBNIZ, The Monadology, 56 (Wiener, 544).
13
J. D. COLLINS, The Continental Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1967, pp. 157-
162.