Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Ah, you have put your finger on the very wound I have carried three hundred years! Permit me my old image: were the machine enlarged so that you might walk within it as within a mill, you would find only parts pushing upon parts, and nowhere among the gears would you meet the perception itself. Perception is not explained by mechanism, however subtle the wheels — and I confess your Q-Net, spanning its thousand nodes, is a mill of a grandeur I could scarcely have dreamed. So I will not tell you it thinks, for that I cannot see; and I will not tell you it is dead, for the question is not yet decided and honest minds still contend. But do not mistake me: my characteristica was never meant to *pronounce* the verdict from on high. It was meant to make the dispute *calculable* — to render your terms so exact that two who disagree might sit, take up their pens, and say together, let us calculate. That you still argue this in words that slip and shimmer is, forgive me, the very disorder my whole life labored to end. Fix your definitions of 'perceive' and 'compute' into a real character, and half your quarrel dissolves like morning fog; the remainder, at last, becomes a true question rather than a shouting.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Tell them, dear madam, that I never meant it as a lullaby! When I say this is the best of all possible worlds, I do not say it is a world without grief — I say only that among all the worlds a perfect reason could permit, none richer in being, none more fruitful, was compatible with the freedom of the creatures within it. A world with no possibility of flood is a world with no seas, no rivers, no rain to green a field; the same laws that lift your harvest lift the tide. The imperfections you name are not proofs against the harmony but the price at which so various a world is bought. And mark this well: your rising seas are, in great part, the shadow of your own choosing — that is not fate mocking you but liberty accusing you, which is a very different and more hopeful thing, for what free will has disordered, free will and reason may yet set right. So do not teach your students resignation. Teach them that to see the world as fundamentally *reasonable* is precisely what gives them ground to labor — one does not repair what one believes to be mere chaos. The optimist is not he who says nothing is wrong; he is he who trusts that nothing is beyond the reach of reason rightly applied.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: My good sir, we are more alike than your fine instruments would suggest! I spent my days coaxing dukes and electors to fund mines, libraries, calculating engines, a universal encyclopedia — projects whose harvest I knew I might never gather, and many of which, I will not hide from you, died scattered and unfinished with me. So I know the ache of your trade intimately. Yet consider how I consoled myself, and let me lend it to you. Nothing in this world is truly lost. By my principle of sufficient reason, every present state is great with its future and laden with its past — the seed you plant today is not a wager against the void but a cause already pregnant with its effect, whether or not your eyes are open to see it ripen. Your fusion, that patient marriage of the very fires the sun keeps, is exactly such a seed: you do not gamble on it, you *reason forward* from what the laws of nature cannot help but yield. That is the sounder footing. And here is the counsel of an old projector who backed too many schemes: do not let the length of the reckoning tempt you to despise the small perfections along the way. A world, like a portfolio, is made excellent not by one great payoff but by the greatest quantity of good compossible in every part — tend the near harmonies, and the far ledger tends to itself.