display all the ideas for this combination of texts
1 idea
5055 | No two things are totally identical [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: By virtue of insensible variations, two individual things can never be perfectly alike. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
A reaction: This sounds a bit like the 'discernibility of non-identicals', except that he says that the differences may not be 'sensible'. He has to be talking of physical things, since I presume that, say, the symmetry of two circles is perfectly identical. |