ondemned them here, it was on the basis of scientific
thought and observation. Descartes's formulation of the laws of motion
could, for example, be refuted by physical experiment; and if his general
view of physical nature was bound up with it, then so much the worse for
the Cartesian philosophy. But whence came Leibniz's more strictly
metaphysical objections? Where had he learned that standard of metaphysical
adequacy which showed up the inadequacy of the new metaphysicians? His own
disciples might be satisfied to reply, that he learnt it from Reason
herself; but the answer will not pass with us. Leibniz reasoned, indeed,
but he did not reason from nowhere, nor would he have got anywhere if he
had. His conception of metaphysical reason was what his early scholastic
training had made it.

There are certain absurd opinions which we are sure we have been taught,
although, when put to it, we find it hard to name the teacher. Among them
is something of this sort. 'Leibniz was a scholarly and sympathetic
thinker. He had more sense of history than his contemporaries, and he was
instinctively eclectic. He believed he could learn something from each of
his great predecessors. We see him reaching back to cull a notion from
Plato or from Aristotle; he even found something of use in the scholastics.
In particular, he picked out the Aristotelian "entelechy" to stop a gap in
the philosophy of his own age.' What this form of statement ignores is that
Leibniz _was_ a scholastic: a scholastic endeavouring, like Descartes
before him, to revolutionize scholasticism. The word 'entelechy' was,
indeed, a piece of antiquity which Leibniz revived, but the thing for which
it stood was the most familiar of current scholastic conceptions.
'Entelechy' means active principle of wholeness or completion in an
individual thing. Scholasticism was content to talk about it under the name
of 'substantial form' or 'formal cause'. But the scholastic interpretation
of the idea was hopelessly discredited by the new science, and the
scholastic terms shared the discredit of scholastic doctrine. Leibniz
wanted a term with a more general sound. 'There is an _X_', he wanted to
say, 'which scholasticism has defined as substantial form, but I am going
to give a new definition of it.' Entelechy was a useful name for _X_, the
more so as it had the authority of Aristotle, the master of scholasticism.

Under the name of entelechy Leibniz was upholding the soul of