Wit & Attitude Quote by Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz is doing what he does best: turning metaphysics into a clean piece of bookkeeping. The world, for him, can’t be an infinite chain of “because” with no final ledger entry. So he posits a “necessary substance” - something that exists by its own nature rather than by accident, cause, or historical luck. The phrasing “ultimate reason of things” signals the Principle of Sufficient Reason, his insistence that reality is intelligible all the way down. If you can ask why this exists rather than not, you’re already playing Leibniz’s game, and he intends to win it.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to brute fact. He’s pushing back against the idea that the universe just happens to be here, or that explanation stops at matter in motion. Notice the maneuver: “differentiation of the changes only exists eminently.” “Eminently” is philosophical sleight of hand. It means the source contains perfections without containing them in the same limited, messy way they appear in the world. The diversity we see isn’t stapled onto God like a collage; it’s “in” God as a higher-order fullness, a compressed original from which variations unfold.

Context matters: Leibniz is writing in early modern Europe, where mechanistic science is ascendant and God risks becoming either unnecessary or a mere cosmic engineer. His move is to make God not a rival cause among causes, but the condition that makes causes and explanations possible at all. The concluding “and this is what we call God” is both definition and boundary-drawing: once you accept the demand for an ultimate rational ground, the word “God” becomes less a devotional flourish than the name for the only metaphysical stopping point he’ll allow.