Dec. 21, 2012 Countdown - Day 26: Gottfried Leibniz on GOD's Attributes

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ (1646-1716), German mathematician and philosopher, founder of Infinitesimal Calculus

Leibniz invented the Differential and Integral Calculus (simultaneously with Newton).

1. In his central philosophical work The Monadology (1714), Leibniz wrote: “In God there is Power, which is the source of all, also Knowledge, whose content is the variety of the ideas, and finally Will, which makes changes or products according to the principle of the best.” (Leibniz 1898, No. 48).

2. “God is absolutely perfect, for perfection is nothing but amount of positive reality, in the strict sense, leaving out of account the limits or bounds in things which are limited. And where there are no bounds, that is to say in God, perfection is absolutely infinite.

It follows also that created beings derive their perfections from the influence of God, but that their imperfections come from their own nature, which is incapable of being without limits. For it is in this that they differ from God.” (Leibniz 1898, No. 41-42).

3. “God alone is the primary unity or original simple substance, of which all created or derivative Monads are products and have their birth, so to speak, through continual fulgurations of the Divinity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, of whose essence it is to have limits.” (Leibniz 1898, No. 47).