Daily Inspiration Quote by Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz is trying to make stillness philosophically illegal. If you picture “substance” as a lump of being that just sits there, he thinks you’re smuggling in a dead metaphysics: an inert stuff that only later gets pushed around by forces. His wager is cleaner and more provocative: what something is cannot be separated from what it does. Activity isn’t an add-on; it’s the very grammar of existence.

The intent is partly technical, partly polemical. Leibniz is writing against the era’s prestige models of matter and mind: Cartesian substance as extended “res extensa” on one side, and a soul that can be described as a thing with properties on the other. He also has Hobbesian and mechanist physics in his sights, where reality is built out of passive particles bumped into motion. By insisting that even “immaterial” substances are inconceivable without activity, he collapses the easy divide between a lively mind and a sluggish world. Everything that counts as a substance must have an inner principle of action.

The subtext is his signature move: replace the metaphysics of contact with the metaphysics of expression. In Leibniz’s universe, the basic units (monads, in his mature view) don’t trade pushes and pulls; they unfold their own states from within. “Bare essence” is a philosophical mirage because essence, for him, is inherently dispositional: to be a thing is to be a source of changes, perceptions, tendencies.

Contextually, this is also an early modern bid to reconcile a mathematically describable nature with a meaningful one. Activity becomes the bridge: a world intelligible to science without reducing it to lifeless hardware.