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| 19355 | The soul doesn't understand many of its own actions, if perceptions are confused and desires buried |
| Full Idea: The soul does many things without knowing how it does them - when it does them by means of confused perceptions and unconscious inclinations or appetites. | |||
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Note L to Bayle's 'Rorarius' [1705], [L]) | |||
| A reaction: This increasingly strikes me as a wonderful and important insight for its time. He's really paid attention to his own mind, and given up the simplistic view that derives from Descartes. Are birds conscious? Yes or no! Silly. |
| 19350 | We should say that body is mechanism and soul is immaterial, asserting their independence |
| Full Idea: I think we should keep both sides: we should be more Democritean and make all actions of bodies mechanical and independent of souls, and we should also be more than Platonic and hold that all actions of souls are immaterial and independent of mechanism. | |||
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Note L to Bayle's 'Rorarius' [1705], [C]) | |||
| A reaction: This is about as dualist as it is possible to get. It certainly looks as if many of Leibniz's doctrines are rebellions against Spinoza (in this case his 'dual aspect monism'). I take Leibniz to be utterly but heroically wrong. |
| 19356 | Minds unconsciously count vibration beats in music, and enjoy it when they coincide |
| Full Idea: In music, the soul counts the beats of the vibrating object which makes the sound, and when these beats regularly coincide at short intervals, it finds them pleasing. Thus it counts without knowing it. | |||
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Note L to Bayle's 'Rorarius' [1705], [L]) | |||
| A reaction: Only a mathematician would see music this way! He is defending his account of the unconscious mind. The proposal that we unconsciously count sounds highly implausible. He needs to recognise the patterns that ground mathematics. |