{"id":10502,"date":"2014-09-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-optimistic-science-of-leibniz"},"modified":"2021-06-01T13:12:21","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T17:12:21","slug":"the-optimistic-science-of-leibniz","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-optimistic-science-of-leibniz","title":{"rendered":"The Optimistic Science of Leibniz"},"content":{"rendered":"

The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646\u20131716) is chiefly remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two reasons. First, he invented the calculus \u2014 independently, most scholars now agree, of its other inventor Newton. And second, he authored the provocative statement that this world is \u201cthe best of all possible worlds.\u201d This claim was famously lampooned in Voltaire\u2019s 1759 satire Candide<\/i>, in which the title character, \u201cstunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling, said to himself: \u2014 If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?\u201d Leibniz\u2019s posthumous reputation, already marred by the accusation he had plagiarized Newton\u2019s calculus, never recovered from Voltaire\u2019s mockery. Even in his homeland of Germany, the name Leibniz is perhaps more widely known for a beloved butter cookie named after him than for the man himself.<\/p>\n

Yet Leibniz is one of the most impressive figures in the history of modern science, mathematics, and philosophy. It seems impossible that one individual could accomplish all that he did. Leibniz worked unflaggingly at whatever task he set himself to, writing copiously on such diverse subjects as politics, theology, mathematics, and physics, and contributing with singular erudition to many other topics, such as chemistry, medicine, astronomy, geology, paleontology, optics, and philology. He was a historian, a poet, a legal theorist, a diplomat, a cryptographer, and a philosopher who thought it possible to reconcile theology with metaphysics and science. A preeminent man of letters, he was also a cosmopolitan writer of letters, exchanging about fifteen thousand of them with more than a thousand correspondents in French, German, and Latin. Physically, Leibniz may have been nothing special \u2014 in fact, he was hunched, bowlegged, and nearsighted \u2014 but his far-reaching intellect brought him into contact with scholars of the first rank, as well as statesmen, courtiers, and dignitaries around Europe.<\/p>\n

The diversity of Leibniz\u2019s interests and undertakings is dizzying. How are we to make sense of a man who contributed prominently to so many fields, including both religion and science? In our day, it is common to think especially of religion and science as either pulling in opposing directions in their respective understandings of the world, or as parallel but different domains. How did they hang together for Leibniz?<\/p>\n

One of the hallmarks of Leibniz\u2019s vast undertakings is that he strove to unify his kaleidoscopic interests into a single whole that deeply integrated faith and science, philosophy and politics, and shaped both his public and private life. This complex effort is difficult to summarize, but Maria Rosa Antognazza, author of an indispensable 2009 intellectual biography of Leibniz<\/a>, captures its essence about as succinctly as possible when she describes Leibniz\u2019s project as an \u201call-encompassing, systematic plan of development of the whole encyclopaedia of the sciences, to be pursued as a collaborative enterprise publicly supported by an enlightened ruler,\u201d the final goal of which was \u201cthe improvement of the human condition and thereby the celebration of the glory of God in His creation.\u201d The motivating force of Leibniz\u2019s life\u2019s work was his optimism, which grew out of his philosophical and theological convictions. It is perhaps best understood as the optimism of a scientist who believed not only that science was going to get<\/i> the truth but also that the truth was something worth getting for its practical and moral benefits.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tA Life of Ideas and Projects\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

G<\/span>ottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born into an academic family in Leipzig, Saxony, in 1646, two years prior to the Peace of Westphalia that brought to an end the bloody Thirty Years\u2019 War. His father was a professor of moral philosophy. His mother was the daughter of a well-known jurist and professor of law, and, after the death of her parents and before her marriage, had been a member of two other academic households: that of a theology professor and then of a law professor.<\/p>\n

Leibniz grew up in a conservative area surrounded by strict Lutherans, not only in his immediate and extended families but in Leipzig generally. Antognazza writes that the public practice of both Roman Catholicism and Calvinism was then outlawed in Saxony; even sympathy toward them was looked upon very suspiciously. Such parochialism and dogmatism later came to be a barrier for Leibniz, who, while never rejecting Lutheranism, preferred a much more ecumenical approach to religion, even trying to unify Calvinist and Lutheran denominations as well as Catholics, Protestants, and Greek Orthodox.<\/p>\n

Leibniz\u2019s ecumenical thinking may have had its origins in his early education. His father died when Leibniz was only six, and at eight years of age he was given access to his father\u2019s library. Apart from the Greek and Latin classics, it most likely included books that ran counter to Lutheran theology and thus would normally have been kept from the eyes of a young Saxon. During the day, Leibniz received structured, formal education at one of Saxony\u2019s best Latin schools, and self-directed, unstructured education of his father\u2019s library in the evenings and weekends.<\/p>\n

At fourteen, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study philosophy. \u201cI was very young when I began to meditate,\u201d he would later write<\/a>, \u201cand I was not quite fifteen when I strolled for whole days in a grove to take sides between Aristotle and Democritus.\u201d Even then, Leibniz was nagged by the tension between the teleological account of nature inherited from Aristotle and engrained in academia, and the new mechanical physics, represented by Galileo and Descartes, that hearkened back to the ancient Greek atomist Democritus. Early in Leibniz\u2019s career, mechanism won out and led him to focus on mathematics, but, as we shall see, he later appropriated into his system something akin to the substantial forms of Aristotle.<\/p>\n

For reasons not entirely known, Leibniz was denied the doctor\u2019s degree of law at Leipzig and left the city, never to live there again. After quickly finishing, defending, and publishing his dissertation at the University of Altdorf at age twenty, he turned down the offer of a professorship, presumably to pursue his independent work of reforming the sciences \u2014 a project involving far more than the academy.<\/p>\n

Leibniz was highly productive in his early twenties: he served as secretary for the alchemical society of Nuremberg (although the details surrounding this position are unclear); he completed a work on a new method for teaching and learning jurisprudence, devised plans for a vast expansion of an encyclopedia, wrote a work of political science concerning the election of a king of Poland as well as several texts explicating the traditional doctrines of transubstantiation, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Trinity, and the soul\u2019s immortality. In order to advance his ideas on philosophy and the science of motion, he began a correspondence with the secretary of the Royal Society of London. He also made contact with the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris; started to work on a calculating machine; concocted a scheme, the Egyptian plan, to persuade Louis XIV of France to mitigate his expansion into Holland and attack Egypt instead; and somehow also found time to serve as secretary, lawyer, librarian, and advisor for the prominent baron who was his patron and friend.<\/p>\n

With his patron\u2019s assistance, Leibniz was invited to present his Egyptian plan in Paris in 1672. But when Leibniz arrived, England had already pronounced war on Holland, and France was not far behind. Rather than altering the proposal, Leibniz abandoned the project but remained in Paris, ultimately spending four fruitful years there. His acquaintance with and tutelage under the Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens (then in Paris heading the Academy of Sciences) proved to be of special importance; it was under Huygens\u2019s guidance that Leibniz visited London to present the Royal Society with a model of a calculating machine<\/a> capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Unfortunately, the machine did not work as well as promised and was not greeted with unanimous approval. Still, the trip to England was a useful one, because Leibniz was able to visit with the experimental chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician John Pell who directed him to recent work in mathematics that preceded Leibniz\u2019s similar work on series of differences, anticipating his later invention of the calculus. Leibniz was also elected a fellow at the Royal Society of London in 1673. After returning to Paris, Leibniz redoubled his efforts in mathematics, studying the works of Pascal and Descartes and other mathematicians, and he refined his calculating machine and introduced his invention of a chronometer.<\/p>\n

During his years based in Paris, Leibniz met with many leading European philosophers, theologians, and mathematicians. He desired to remain in Paris under similar conditions to those of Huygens \u2014 who was given living quarters and a lifelong pension under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences \u2014 but no invitation was extended, presumably because there was a feeling that too many foreigners were already in the Academy. (It was not until 1700 that Leibniz was elected a foreign member.) So it was with some trepidation that the thirty-year-old Leibniz accepted an offer of a post as librarian and court councilor at Hanover from Duke Johann Friedrich.<\/p>\n

Hanover would become Leibniz\u2019s home for the rest of his life. As best he could, he continued his independent work while fulfilling the duties of his new position. But the duke\u2019s successor also tasked him with writing a history of the courtly family line, the Guelph family, a European dynasty reaching back at least six hundred years and with roots in Northern Italy. Always compulsively striving for completeness, Leibniz began with Charlemagne and the origins of the Holy Roman Empire in the eighth century, although even this starting point needed to be prefaced with two treatises, one on the geological history of the earth and of Lower Saxony, and one on the history of the province\u2019s inhabitants. The entire project occupied him for nearly thirty years, until the end of his life, by which time he still had not reached his intended endpoint. More than a decade into the project, he lamented in a letter to a friend:<\/p>\n\n\n

I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am. I am trying to find various things in the archives; I look at old papers and hunt up unpublished documents…. I receive and answer a huge number of letters. At the same time, I have so many mathematical results, philosophical thoughts, and other literary innovations that should not be left to disappear, that I often do not know where to begin…. Thanks to the help of a craftsman whom I have engaged, the calculator with which one can do multiplications up to twelve decimal places is finally ready. A year has gone by; I still have the craftsman with me in order to make more machines of this type, for they are in constant demand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Fifteen years later, Leibniz wrote with similar regret: \u201cIf I were relieved of my historical tasks I would set myself to establishing the elements of general philosophy and natural theology, which comprise what is most important in that philosophy for both theory and practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

To some extent, Leibniz resented being stuck in Hanover, a provincial city. As he wrote to an English acquaintance: \u201cAll that bothers me is that I am not in a great city like Paris or London, where there are plenty of learned men from whom one can benefit and even receive assistance. For many things cannot be accomplished on one\u2019s own. But here one scarcely finds anyone to talk to; or rather, in this country it is not regarded as appropriate for a courtier to speak of learned matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, even while engaged in his historical research, Leibniz managed to get much work done in philosophy, mathematics, and science. And he took advantage of opportunities to travel abroad, most notably on a three-year research trip (1687\u20131690) to Bavaria, Austria, and Italy. In Florence, he discussed mathematics with Galileo\u2019s last pupil, Vincenzo Viviani. Leibniz was especially welcomed in Rome. Besides being given access to the Vatican archives, he frequented the meetings of the Accademia Fisico-Matematica, urged for lifting the Vatican\u2019s ban on Copernican astronomy, and was offered the position of custodian of the Vatican library, which he might have accepted had it not come with the condition that he convert to Catholicism. In Vienna, Leibniz earned a hearing with the emperor, Leopold I, and conferred with a leading figure in the attempt to reunify Rome and the Protestant churches.<\/p>\n

Leibniz\u2019s plans for an academy of sciences in his own country came to fruition in 1700, when, using the French Academy as a model, he founded the Berlin Society of Sciences, of which he was to become the first president. Founding such an institution was part of Leibniz\u2019s plan to move science out of the academy \u2014 the university setting \u2014 into the academies \u2014 groups of working scientists, many of whom were not employed by universities. However, for its first decade the academy was little more than a name, and once its efforts began in earnest, Leibniz\u2019s participation was minimized. (The organization was later called the Prussian Academy of Sciences; its successor in our own day is the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps partly due to his own declining health after the age of fifty, Leibniz proposed a number of improvements for medical practice, including blood and urine tests, transfusions, autopsies, animal experimentation, human experimentation (if it was not dangerous to the subject), study of the spread of disease, regular physical examination (including measurement of a patient\u2019s temperature), recording of data about the course of a patient\u2019s illness, recording and collecting of all observations to be shared with others, and the establishment of more medical schools \u2014 all these as part of a medical system to be supported by the government.<\/p>\n

Contributing to each of the physical, life, formal, and applied sciences, Leibniz was truly a polymath. His development of the calculus is his most famous contribution to mathematics. But it is his work in physics that, among his scientific achievements, probably had the most impact, and he developed the calculus principally as a tool to express his physics, with implications, as Antognazza writes, \u201creaching far beyond mathematics and physics to logic, philosophy, religion, ethics, and politics\u201d to the creation of a mathematically precise language to help resolve disputes of all sorts.<\/p>\n

Entire books have been written about the complicated controversy over the invention of the calculus. In the 1670s, Leibniz had seen various mathematical ideas that Newton had circulated but not yet published. Nearly forty years later, after both men had published their versions of the calculus, followers of the Englishman began publicly accusing the German of stealing. Newton had a legion of supporters making the case for his priority while Leibniz stood almost alone. And he grappled with the Newtonians on a wider range of issues as well. Leibniz opposed Newton\u2019s views on motion and gravity, and on the nature of space and time. Leibniz founded, in his own words, \u201ca new science of dynamics,\u201d that challenged and improved on Newton\u2019s understanding of the laws of motion, and he claimed<\/a> to have been the first to have \u201cexplained the notion of force.\u201d Some two centuries later, Albert Einstein, commenting on the conflicting views Newton and Leibniz had on fundamental questions of physics, remarked that Leibniz was groping in the right direction. Einstein wrote in 1954<\/a> that Newton\u2019s view of space was one of his \u201cgreatest achievements\u201d and \u201cin the contemporary state of science, the only possible one, and particularly the only fruitful one,\u201d but that Leibniz\u2019s resistance to it, while \u201csupported by inadequate arguments,\u201d was \u201cintuitively well founded\u201d and \u201cactually justified.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only did Leibniz push back against some aspects of the reigning mechanistic physics of his day, he also believed that it was in fact compatible with certain important elements of Aristotelian metaphysics, and he sought to reconcile the two conflicting conceptions of nature that were then as they are now subject to much controversy. \"Gottfried
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ca. 1700
(Courtesy Wikimedia<\/a>)<\/i><\/span>One famous synthesis of this kind appears in his late work Monadology<\/a><\/i> (1714), wherein Leibniz provided an alternative to the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, which held that the two are separate substances acting on one another. Like Descartes, Leibniz affirmed the reality of mind, but maintained instead that everything \u2014 minds and bodies \u2014 is composed of immaterial mind-like substances (monads) that, rather than acting on one another, have been placed in pre-established harmony with each other by the Creator.<\/p>\n

Although stung by the charges of plagiarism leveled against him, Leibniz responded to the loyal Newtonians with grace and even some generosity. Most notably, his correspondence<\/a> with Samuel Clarke, which encompassed a host of cosmological and theological issues, was carried out with the utmost politeness and courtesy. This accords with the accounts of Leibniz\u2019s exchanges and interactions with others in general, which present an image of a gentle, considerate, kind, and jolly man, eager to smooth over tensions with others and not easily disappointed. But the clash with the Newtonians took a toll on his spirit and greatly diminished his reputation.<\/p>\n

Many were the frustrations of Leibniz\u2019s final years. In a life overflowing with projects and ideas, he seemed to have little time for close relationships that were more than just epistolary, although he did have a few intimate friendships. Several of his most cherished correspondents were women in high places with whom he shared intellectual interests, but he never married or had children. Most of his patrons and his admirers among the Hanoverian court predeceased him. Age brought nearsightedness, gout, and arthritis. And a political development that could have brought him new opportunities for influence and renown \u2014 the ascent in 1714 of his employer, the ruler of Hanover, to the throne of England, becoming George I \u2014 brought new humiliation. When the rest of the court left for London, Leibniz was ordered to stay behind and keep working in the relative isolation of Hanover on the family-history project. Leibniz might not have found the London scene very welcoming anyway, given the ascendancy there of Newton and his followers. Meanwhile, a new scientific society in Vienna \u2014 one that Leibniz had worked assiduously to establish and that he expected to lead \u2014 failed to materialize. Despite ties that he cultivated with the emperor in Vienna and even with Russia\u2019s Peter the Great, Leibniz\u2019s hopes of ever escaping his historical work in Hanover to assume positions of influence elsewhere dimmed.<\/p>\n

During his lifetime and after, speculation ran wild over Leibniz\u2019s theological leanings. Some suspected he might have been a deist or an atheist. Neither label is correct. He did not accept the deists\u2019 rejection of revelation and mysteries, holding instead that revelation needed not to involve proven contradictions and that mysteries were above reason but not against it. And while he rarely attended church services and took communion irregularly at best, he was far from being an agnostic, and he was certainly not an atheist. But the townspeople and the aristocrats in Hanover looked at him with suspicion, calling him a \u201cL\u00f6wenix<\/a>\u201d \u2014 one who \u201cbelieves nothing.\u201d When he died in 1716, rumors circulated that on his deathbed, he spoke of alchemy and refused religious blessings. His funeral was sparsely attended, supposedly due to his reputed agnosticism.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tThe Best of All Possible Worlds\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

N<\/span>otwithstanding all his other accomplishments, what Leibniz became most famous for in the popular imagination after his death was his claim that this world was the best of all that are possible. The statement would surely not have become as well known as it did were it not for Voltaire\u2019s mockery of it in Candide<\/i><\/a>, and one may be inclined to agree with Voltaire that Leibniz\u2019s point deserves ridicule. But Leibniz was being neither flippant nor blindly optimistic; rather, his optimism deserves careful analysis, as it helps shed light on his understanding of science and its moral implications.<\/p>\n

The statement originates in the only book Leibniz published during his lifetime<\/a>, a volume that explores the vexing question of how God can be good and just and all-powerful if evil and injustice and suffering exist. (We now call this the problem of \u201ctheodicy,\u201d after the title Leibniz gave this little volume.) In the book, Leibniz defines \u201cworld\u201d as \u201cthe whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe.\u201d In this world, everything is dependent on something else for its existence \u2014 so that in order for the whole world to exist, a first cause must have brought it into being. But an infinite number of worlds were \u201cequally possible,\u201d so that in creating this world, the first cause must have been able to consider all other possible worlds. This first cause, being \u201cinfinite in all ways\u201d \u2014 including in power, wisdom, and goodness \u2014 must have chosen the best of all possible worlds.<\/p>\n

It is a point of interpretive controversy how close to perfection Leibniz believed the best world comes. While most think that Leibniz considered it to be good in absolute terms, both metaphysically and morally, at least one commentator, Matthew Stewart in The Courtier and the Heretic<\/a><\/i> (2006), considers Leibniz to be \u201cin fact one of history\u2019s great pessimists,\u201d who recognized the vanity of striving for progress in this world that is ultimately indifferent to our desires. Truth \u2014 the noble aim of philosophy and the sciences \u2014 remained ineffective in politics, and Leibniz understood, according to Stewart, that some measure of deception, both in politics and in theology, seemed necessary for achieving good. If theology demands the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds, the harsh reality of political life makes clear that \u201cbest\u201d would simply mean that the other worlds would have been even worse than this one. But this cynical view of Leibniz\u2019s optimism requires not only an excessively imaginative and tortuous reading of some of his most important works; it would also seem to be undermined by the dedication Leibniz brought to several other efforts, including especially his project to advance all the sciences, which we will return to shortly. A proper understanding of this project reveals that Leibniz\u2019s philosophical and theological optimism in fact shaped his vision of advancing the sciences, and that his political and ecumenical work was often aimed at furthering that end.<\/p>\n

Leibniz made clear that he did not mean that the best world is composed only of the best parts, just as \u201cthe part of a beautiful thing is not always beautiful.\u201d While some aspects of the world may not seem good in themselves, they are part of a whole that is better than all the alternatives. No part could in fact have been other than it is, neither better nor worse, since then the world would no longer be as it is, and this world is the best, having been chosen by an infinitely wise God.<\/p>\n

For instance, as Leibniz explains, \u201cit is true that one may imagine possible worlds without sin and without unhappiness, and one could make some like Utopian … romances: but these same worlds again would be very inferior to ours in goodness,\u201d because humans, being free to act, are able to choose between good or evil, and \u201cthere is no rational creature without some organic body, and there is no created spirit entirely detached from matter,\u201d subject to pain and decay. To be free and to be both spirit and matter is good, even if this condition allows for evil and unhappiness. For sometimes \u201can evil brings forth a good,\u201d and it is a false maxim \u201cthat the happiness of rational creatures is the sole aim of God.\u201d God\u2019s creation is immense, and human beings make up only a tiny part of it, spatially and temporally; what makes us unhappy may well contribute to the good of the whole or to other creatures. Those who nevertheless criticize God\u2019s creation, Leibniz writes in Theodicy<\/i>, should receive the following answer:<\/p>\n\n\n

You have known the world only since the day before yesterday, you see scarce farther than your nose, and you carp at the world. Wait until you know more of the world and consider therein especially the parts which present a complete whole (as do organic bodies); and you will find there a contrivance and a beauty transcending all imagination. Let us thence draw conclusions as to the wisdom and the goodness of the author of things, even in things that we know not. We find in the universe some things which are not pleasing to us; but let us be aware that it is not made for us alone. It is nevertheless made for us if we are wise: it will serve us if we use it for our service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Some have objected that if this is the best possible world then it would already be paradise and there would be no reason to hope for a better world after this, and the grace of God for salvation would be obsolete. But this is to misunderstand Leibniz\u2019s position. He strongly affirms the orthodox doctrines that sin is real and that grace is needed for redemption. A given day or age is not necessarily the best possible, nor is our life on earth. While the world as a whole is the best possible, improvement of individual parts is in fact at the heart of Leibniz\u2019s concern. In the sciences, in philosophy and theology, and in politics, he always aimed to improve the human condition.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tScientific Optimism\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

L<\/span>eibniz seemed confident that science would eventually confirm his optimism. As he wrote in 1686 in his Discourse on Metaphysics<\/a><\/i> (published posthumously), \u201csince we have always recognized God\u2019s wisdom in the detail of the mechanical structure of some particular bodies, it must also be displayed in the general economy of the world and in the constitution of the laws of nature.\u201d More specifically, it is in God\u2019s good ends, in the final causes Leibniz desired to preserve in physics, that \u201cwe must seek the principle of all existences and laws of nature, because God always intends the best and most perfect.\u201d Science \u2014 learning about the workings of the universe \u2014 can confirm empirically what can be known of God and his actions, thereby making the goodness of God\u2019s design more apparent. This kind of optimism in science\u2019s ability to reveal the world has at least two salient features: it is forward-looking and it presumes that scientists from all over the globe can resolve their controversies.<\/p>\n

Not all forms of optimism are entirely forward-looking. Some optimists seek to restore a lost Edenic past. Others consider the present to be perfect, ignoring the dark realities of nature and human experience. Leibniz, who is sometimes thought to have held the latter view, actually, as we have just seen, rejected it. Indeed, a simplistic and narrow optimism about the present runs directly counter to scientific endeavor, which seeks truth and creates tools in part precisely because the present world is not as it ought to be. The American intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy, in the 1927 essay \u201cOptimism and Romanticism<\/a>,\u201d wrote about eighteenth-century optimists \u2014 commonly known to hold the view that \u201cthis is the best of possible worlds\u201d \u2014 that \u201cthere was in fact nothing in the optimist\u2019s creed which logically required him either to blink or to belittle the facts which we ordinarily call evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

A forward-looking form of optimism (sometimes termed meliorism, or more rarely, agathism) is the optimism of the working scientist, who is confident that the unknown can be made known. Perhaps possessing this kind of confidence in progressive knowledge is an essential characteristic of the scientist, without which he has little drive or motivation. But this, of course, does not mean that such progress is always linear. The great nineteenth-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared himself<\/a> to a mountain climber who, \u201cnot knowing the way, ascends slowly and toilsomely and is often compelled to retrace his steps because his progress is blocked; who, sometimes by reasoning and sometimes by accident, hits upon signs of a fresh path, which leads him a little farther.\u201d Leibniz used a similar analogy, writing that \u201cwe sometimes retrace our footsteps in order to leap forward with greater vigor.\u201d He was drawn to the image of the spiral; it represented for him non-linear, yet non-circular progress. A spiral and the words inclinata resurget <\/i>(what declines will rise again) were inscribed on Leibniz\u2019s coffin.<\/p>\n

Scientific optimism seems also to promise that, given enough time, scientists will arrive at the same answers to the same questions, even if they work independently. In the 1878 essay \u201cHow to Make Our Ideas Clear,\u201d Charles Sanders Peirce expressed this promise<\/a> well:<\/p>\n\n\n

All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to every question to which they can be applied…. They may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects his method and his processes, the results are found to move steadily toward a destined center. So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion…. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Today\u2019s scientists \u2014 more conscious than their forebears of the influence of theoretical commitments on scientific practice \u2014 may not be quite as convinced that all disagreements could be resolved simply through perfection of methods and processes. Even Peirce, in a later version of the above essay<\/a>, tellingly changed \u201cfully persuaded\u201d to \u201canimated to a cheerful hope\u201d and \u201cthis great law\u201d to \u201cthis great hope.\u201d But the original statement certainly captures Leibniz\u2019s optimism about science.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tWorking Together for the Common Good\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

L<\/span>eibniz\u2019s optimism \u2014 that science not only is able<\/i> to discover the world but that it actually will<\/i> continue to advance in this effort and<\/i> will do so for the good of humankind \u2014 can be further characterized by pointing to three conditions that Leibniz seems to have had for science and that he sought to meet in his own scientific views and work: science must be progressive without simply overturning the science of the past, it must be collaborative, and it must be conducive to morality.<\/p>\n

The first condition is already apparent from what has been said about Leibniz\u2019s own approach to science of the past. Leibniz\u2019s physics was a blend of the old and the new, seeking to merge Aristotelian teleology \u2014 eschewed by others like Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza \u2014 with the new mechanistic understanding of matter. He thought that scientists should see themselves in a kind of ageless dialogue with the great philosophers and scientists who preceded them. They are not to proceed subversively, with the intent to supplant the past.<\/p>\n

Leibniz\u2019s second condition for scientific progress \u2014 collaboration \u2014 defined his entire scientific, political, and religious enterprise. Leibniz recognized early on that scientific knowledge is not in the power of one mere mortal, and so desired collaboration among the scientists of different nations. He wanted to merge the academies of France, Italy, and England with the newly formed German academy in order to promote \u201cthe universal harmonious relationship of the learned\u201d by supporting education and the sciences, including medicine and the experimental sciences such as physics and astronomy. Leibniz even wanted to include China in this scheme. He had a long-lasting interest in China, although not much was known about it in Leibniz\u2019s Europe. But he befriended or read the writings of a number of Catholic missionaries, whose knowledge of China was the best available. In 1716, the last year of his life, Leibniz wrote a lengthy letter to a French correspondent on the subject of Chinese natural theology and on the relation between the binary number system (which he invented) and its use in deciphering one of China\u2019s oldest sacred books, the I Ching<\/i>. In another 1716 letter<\/a>, this time directed to the Russian tsar Peter the Great, Leibniz wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n

I wanted to add an extract of Chinese or Cathayan (Cataisiennes<\/i>) letters which clearly prove the good intentions which exist there concerning the sciences and how much Your Majesty would help to unite Europe and China….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It seems that God has decided that science should make a tour of the world and penetrate as far as Scythia, that he has designated Your Majesty to be his instrument for that purpose, while Your Majesty is in a position to draw from Europe on one side and from China on the other what there is of the best, and to perfect the institutions of both these countries by means of wise reforms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Over a span of thirty years, Leibniz expended much effort in trying to create such collaboration between scientists of various countries. The gadfly Leibniz initiated contact; he sent numerous letters, proposals, and even machines; and he spent considerable time visiting scientists and principalities throughout Germany and in Austria and Italy. This international academy of his devising was intended to cross religious and political divides, involving such disparate institutions and individuals as the English Royal Society, German princes, the king of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, religious orders, the pope, and even the Dutch East India Company. It was also part of Leibniz\u2019s ecumenical agenda of reconciling the churches, for he knew that without theological reconciliation there would be little chance of establishing lasting communication and thereby collaboration between scientists of different religious persuasions.<\/p>\n

Leibniz believed that progress in scientific knowledge is achieved by a synthesis of different perspectives, none of which is privileged over the others. Such synthesis requires that scientists from different nations, traditions, and languages be able to communicate. This goal motivated Leibniz even from an early age to work on his characteristica universali<\/i>s<\/i> \u2014 a system of symbolic notation \u201cappropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines,\u201d as he explained in his 1677 \u201cPreface to the General Science<\/a>.\u201d This system, the thirty-year-old Leibniz wrote, <\/i>\u201cwill constitute a new language which can be written and spoken; this language will be very difficult to construct, but very easy to learn. It will be quickly accepted by everybody on account of its great utility and its surprising facility, and it will serve wonderfully in communication among various peoples.\u201d (One obvious difficulty in constructing this universal formal language was that it required the very type of collaboration it was meant to make possible. Leibniz recognized early on that he could not achieve success in creating such a language without the assistance of many others. Toward the end of his life, he also saw with more than a touch of disappointment that he had not had sufficient time to create this language.)<\/p>\n

Contrary to what we might expect, not everyone shares Leibniz\u2019s lofty valuation of collaboration among scientists. As the psychiatrist Anthony Storr noted in his 1988 book Solitude<\/a><\/i>, some of the world\u2019s greatest thinkers, including Newton, Kant, and Wittgenstein, were serious loners. And Galileo criticized the notion<\/a> that \u201call the host of good philosophers may be enclosed within four walls. I believe that they fly, and that they fly alone, like eagles, and not in flocks like starlings. It is true that because eagles are rare birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them.\u201d Similarly, Descartes \u2014 in the famous account of his solitary thought experiment in Discourse on Method<\/i><\/a> \u2014 wrote that \u201coften there is less perfection in works composed of several pieces and made by the hand of diverse masters than in those at which one alone has worked.\u201d Indeed, many of Descartes\u2019s most important works, in geometry, optics, physics, and philosophy, he composed in seclusion in Holland, where, as he writes in Discourse on Method<\/i>, \u201cI could live as solitary and retired as in the most remote deserts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leibniz defended the value of scientific collaboration for two different reasons \u2014 one philosophical and one practical and moral. First, Leibniz emphasized that each of us has only limited perception of reality, and any one perceiver can misjudge what he sees. Even a group of observers has only a limited number of perspectives. So if our goal is to gain knowledge \u2014 whether it be religious, philosophical, scientific, or moral \u2014 we must consider the views of others and overcome our singular points of view. We need to \u201cput us in the place of others and others in our place; the exchange of places in thought.\u201d Initially, there will be diversity, disagreement, and uncertainty. But Leibniz was neither a relativist nor a skeptic with regard to the availability of truth; rather, he believed that truth, if sufficiently pursued, eventually prevails in any honest dispute. In the essay \u201cOf the Art of Conference<\/a>,\u201d Michel Montaigne expressed the approach to disagreements that Leibniz sought to overcome: \u201cWe only learn to dispute that we may contradict; and so, every one contradicting and being contradicted, it falls out that the fruit of disputation is to lose and annihilate truth.\u201d Leibniz believed that to engage others in dialogue only to contradict them is both scientifically disingenuous and a moral failing as a person.<\/p>\n

Leibniz\u2019s second reason for collaboration is that it is necessary for the moral and medical use of science. Solitary efforts are sometimes fruitful in such areas as metaphysics, mathematics, or theoretical physics, which depend largely on reasoning, because, as Leibniz writes in Theodicy<\/i>, \u201cappearances are often contrary to truth, but our reasoning never is when it proceeds strictly in accordance with the rules of the art of reasoning.\u201d But, as Leibniz says elsewhere, \u201cMoral and medical matters; these are the things which ought to be valued above all. For this reason I value microscopy far more than telescopy; and if someone were to find a certain and tested cure of any disease whatsoever, he would in my judgment have accomplished something greater than if he had discovered the quadrature of the circle\u201d \u2014 an ancient problem in geometry to which Leibniz himself soon thereafter developed a novel solution using his infinitesimal calculus. Moreover, the collaborative efforts that an international group of scientists can muster for the medical benefit of mankind far exceed the solitary efforts of individuals or of individual nations. Leibniz held that, apart from moral virtue itself, health and social conditions are the greatest contributors to human happiness \u2014 certainly more so than most ventures into astronomy, theoretical mathematics, or metaphysics.<\/p>\n

This brings us to Leibniz\u2019s third condition for scientific progress: it must be morally beneficial. Science should not simply be a truth-seeking or fact-finding enterprise; it is not to be disinterested in its practical use. Neither ought scientists\u2019 focus to be on their own society; they should avoid the parochial. Leibniz\u2019s aim was that science be cosmopolitan with an eye to universal synthesis. But the ultimate goals of science are to glorify God and to further human happiness, which involves loving mankind by acting charitably.<\/b><\/p>\n

Leibniz\u2019s goal was not modest; it was to synthesize philosophy and science within a Christian moral framework. He saw a logical connection between science and Christian charity. Scientific investigation demonstrates the perfection of the universe and thereby also the perfection of its Creator. The knowledge of perfection produces love, because \u201cone loves<\/i> an object in proportion as one feels its perfections; nothing surpasses the divine perfections. Whence it follows that charity and love of God give the greatest pleasure that can be conceived.\u201d And love of God must engender activity in the form of good works; it must lead to charity toward man.<\/p>\n\n\n

Our charity is humble and full of moderation, it presumes not to domineer; attentive alike to our own faults and to the talents of others, we are inclined to criticize our own actions and to excuse and vindicate those of others. We must work out our own perfection and do wrong to no man. There is no piety where there is not charity; and without being kindly and beneficent one cannot show sincere religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

With his work on or correspondence about wind propellers, water pumps, desalinization, lamps, clocks, calculating machines, submarines, steam engines, mining, and many other technical and engineering ideas, Leibniz was an early promoter of what we now call applied science. He was also invested in public policy, especially its role in advancing medicine. He implored medical doctors to ground their theories in observation and experiment, the need for which became even more pressing with the advent of the microscope. To further public health, he advocated a medical administrative authority and state support of medical science and the education of physicians based on the premise that human life \u201cshould never be subject to the marketplace,\u201d for it is a \u201csacred thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leibniz chastised certain Christian millenarian sects for doing nothing to improve the world and instead trying to escape it. Not only did they fail to strive for an understanding of nature in scientific terms, they also did not possess the Christian virtue of charity, he thought. He also criticized the Quietists for failing to act charitably, preferring instead only to meditate. The virtuous person, Leibniz wrote<\/a>, \u201cdirects all one\u2019s intentions to the common good, which is no other than the glory of God. Thus one finds that there is no greater individual interest than to espouse that of the community, and one gains satisfaction for oneself by taking pleasure in the acquisition of true benefits for men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faith and science, for Leibniz, must therefore work in concord. As he did in many ways throughout his career, Leibniz sought to find points of harmony between forces that during his time had grown apart. As the divide between faith and reason widened, various thinkers began to popularize controversial positions that troubled Leibniz. On one side was Spinoza\u2019s rigorous determinism that obliterated the notion of a personal God over and above nature and that largely identified the laws of nature with divine activity. On the other side was the fideism of Pascal and Pierre Bayle, the view that faith is independent of, and possibly even in conflict with, reason.<\/p>\n

Leibniz refuted both of these positions, and his Theodicy<\/i> was in large part a response to them, particularly to fideism. Faith in a perfectly just, wise, and powerful God is rational, he maintained. Reason is not \u201cthe opinions and discourses of men, nor even the habit they have formed of judging things according to the usual course of Nature, but rather the inviolable linking together of truths.\u201d Truth, including the truths of religion, can therefore never be contrary to reason, even if reason cannot fully comprehend all these truths, and \u201cwhen an objection is put forward against some truth, it is always possible to answer it satisfactorily.\u201d Certainly, he argues, \u201cone must always yield to proofs,\u201d and \u201cit is wrong and fruitless to try to weaken opponents\u2019 proofs, under the pretext that they are only objections.\u201d Leibniz maintained that no demonstrations have been offered to render faith irrational.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tAn Active and Good God\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

L<\/span>eibniz\u2019s hope that science would be conducive to the advancement of human health and well-being as well as Christian charity also meant that he found harmful certain scientific theories that did not meet these goals. Today\u2019s discussions about the dangers of science often focus on its double-edged nature \u2014 science\u2019s capacity to cause harm even as it does great good. Leibniz, by contrast, seemed unconcerned about the potential misapplication or abuse of scientific knowledge. Perhaps he was not farsighted enough. But this is not to say that he altogether ignored the potential for moral harm from scientific knowledge, for he was in fact worried about faulty<\/i> science \u2014 that is, sloppy scientific investigation that would result in false and dangerous views, both religious and moral. Proper science, for Leibniz, would correspond with true religious and moral views.<\/p>\n

Although Leibniz himself was not very pious, he was greatly concerned with religious decline and with scientific views that he thought could further it. He thought, for instance, that the new physics propounded by Newton and his followers might contribute to the \u201cdecay\u201d of \u201cnatural religion\u201d in England, as he put it in his famous correspondence with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to the Newtonians, all physical phenomena could in theory be explained by the interaction of invisible atoms moving about a vacuum according to predetermined laws of motion. One of these laws was gravitational interaction between bodies, which, in the Newtonian view, was a universal force governing bodies without intervening physical contact between them. For Leibniz, this account of gravity to explain the inner workings of the universe seemed much like a miraculous force; the Newtonian universe, he argued<\/a>, was akin to a mechanical watch that must be wound up continually by the Creator in order to keep its parts moving:<\/p>\n\n\n

Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God\u2019s making, is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The problem with the Newtonian picture, according to Leibniz, is not, as a contemporary reader might assume, that God becomes a detached watchmaker, indifferent to the details of his creation. Rather, according to Leibniz, Newton\u2019s watchmaker-God is too <\/i>directly involved in his creation because his creation is imperfect. And an imperfect creation implies an imperfect God. In other words, Newton\u2019s vision, Leibniz criticized, was of an intrinsically imperfect creation that needed miraculous intervention in order to be maintained. This is not the awesome, harmonious creation that a God worthy of worship would create, Leibniz thought. What is so great about an architect and carpenter who designs and builds a house that requires continual repair?<\/p>\n

By contrast, Leibniz held that the most perfect universe possible would be one in which the interaction of created things occurred entirely by natural causes, without a force that seemed unnatural. Though not completely self-sufficient, such a universe would at least not require continual miraculous intervention to make up for its inherent deficiencies. Leibniz writes<\/a>, \u201cwhen God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.\u201d The Newtonian clockwork universe is thus unworthy of God.<\/p>\n

Clarke responded by saying that Leibniz\u2019s God is, for all intents and purposes, an absent creator \u2014 an intelligence beyond the world that cannot act within the world except by a miracle. A world that is a perfectly self-sufficient mechanism, Clarke charged, would need no attention, conservation, or intervention. But this reveals<\/a> a misunderstanding of Leibniz: \u201cI do not say, the material world is a machine, or watch, that goes without God\u2019s interposition.\u201d For Leibniz, the created world does indeed need continual divine concurrence: all things are created and sustained by God\u2019s activity. But Leibniz\u2019s point was that it doesn\u2019t require fixing; God doesn\u2019t need to intervene to mend it.<\/p>\n

Unlike the human watchmaker, God not only creates<\/i> a machine, he creates a perfect<\/i> machine. God\u2019s creation is a \u201cwatch, that goes without wanting to be mended by him.\u201d But such perfection is possible because \u201cGod has foreseen every thing; he has provided a remedy for every thing beforehand.\u201d Thus Leibniz\u2019s God is greater than all artists or workmen not only because of his power to create, but also because of his infinite wisdom. \u201cThe bare production of every thing, would indeed show the power<\/i> of God; but it would not sufficiently show his wisdom<\/i>,\u201d Leibniz writes.<\/p>\n

Leibniz charges the Newtonians with assuming, on the contrary, that God\u2019s \u201cexcellency\u201d is \u201conly on the account of power.\u201d They thus come dangerously close to a voluntaristic view of God \u2014 that is, a view that emphasizes God\u2019s will above his reason and goodness. According to this understanding, sometimes attributed to Descartes, God\u2019s actions are good only because he wills them. According to Leibniz, however, God\u2019s power must be inseparable from his essential wisdom and goodness. Though free, Leibniz\u2019s God wills a rational, harmonious, and beautiful universe because of his divine nature. Perfection prevails not because of divine will alone, but because of divine wisdom and goodness.<\/p>\n

But Leibniz was not concerned merely with defending a particular view of God. Just as Leibniz rejected a voluntaristic notion of God in his correspondence with the Newtonians and in his Theodicy<\/i>, he also denounced voluntaristic views of the rights of kings. In the unfinished manuscript \u201cMeditation on the Common Concept of Justice<\/a>,\u201d he argued, largely against Hobbes, that both divine justice and human justice are intrinsically bound to goodness and reason. Might does not make right; rather, a king\u2019s right to rule is inseparable from his moral responsibility of charity. Indeed, \u201cjustice is nothing else than the charity of the wise\u201d and \u201cconforms to the will of a sage whose wisdom is infinite and whose power is proportioned to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leibniz was especially concerned about the French \u201cSun King,\u201d Louis XIV, who ruled for a remarkable seventy-two years, virtually throughout Leibniz\u2019s entire life, and through his aggressive expansionist foreign policy frequently threatened order in Europe. In a 1683 political satire, Mars Christianissimus<\/a> <\/i>(Most Christian War-Go<\/i>d<\/i>), <\/i>Leibniz mocked the twisted logic and poor scriptural defense of the king\u2019s persistent aggression.<\/p>\n

The distinct feature of Leibniz\u2019s work that becomes apparent here is that all these disciplines \u2014 science, philosophy, theology, politics \u2014 are intertwined, informing each other and together shaping Leibniz\u2019s aim of seeing science flourish for the human good under the guidance of a wise and benevolent ruler.<\/p>\n\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/svg>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\t
\r\n\t\tThe Unfinished System\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

L<\/span>eibniz\u2019s current reputation as a great early-modern scientist and major Enlightenment philosopher has been slow in coming. While highly respected by many of his contemporaries, including by the leading scientific societies, by other philosophers, and by the many men and women with whom he corresponded, much of his scientific and philosophical work did not retain the wide attention of scholars after his death. Most of what he wrote was in personal letters. Only the Theodicy<\/i> was widely read, but its subject matter was narrow compared to the immense breadth of Leibniz\u2019s work. The bitter dispute with Newton and the Royal Society over the discovery of the calculus and Voltaire\u2019s derision of Leibnizian optimism in Candide<\/i> tarnished his reputation. And even when Leibniz\u2019s name was later uttered in praise, it was often because he was considered the main influence on the German mathematician and philosopher Christian Wolff (1679\u20131754) who had tasked himself with systematizing Leibniz\u2019s work. Today, however, Leibniz is recognized universally to have been a much greater thinker than Wolff.<\/p>\n

The transition from wide disregard to deep respect in Leibniz\u2019s reputation as a philosopher and scientist coincided \u2014 and is still ongoing \u2014 with the slow cataloguing and dissemination of his vast number of writings. The first complete publication of Leibniz\u2019s collected writings and letters, which, when finished, will take up eight multi-volume series<\/a>, is currently still in process as a collaborative project of four German institutions<\/a>. Collecting and organizing Leibniz\u2019s work in various other incomplete publications has increasingly enabled scholars to see that Leibniz\u2019s spontaneity, easily distracted intellect, and interest in so many subjects were not the earmarks of a dilettante but the wellsprings of profound, if incomplete, philosophy and science. It was philosophy and science not only in the purely speculative realm but often with a view toward practical use, specifically toward human well-being. As Antognazza writes, \u201cfor all the heights of his logical, mathematical, and metaphysical thinking, Leibniz kept his feet sufficiently firmly on the ground to understand that political stability, health, and social security contributed more to the happiness of human beings than many elevated meditations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, his religious convictions were not a mere appendage to otherwise secular, scientific thought. Neither, as Antognazza writes at the end of her biography, was Leibniz\u2019s \u201cacceptance of Christianity … duplicitous lip service paid to powerful patrons\u201d; it was \u201cinextricably interwoven with his philosophical doctrines and his practical endeavors.\u201d It was front and center to his entire work, shaping his theoretical and his applied science, his politics, and his grand project of unifying scientists from diverse political and religious backgrounds into academies that would advance Christian charity. His optimism that this project would indeed come to fruition and that over time science would reveal the perfections of nature and its Creator is best characterized as a belief that scientific knowledge and its moral use would grow out of philosophical and theological convictions about the goodness of the world. It is striking to consider how similar and yet how alien that optimism is to the optimism of today\u2019s scientists.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his encyclopedic project of physics and faith<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17659,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5047,5007,5008,5031],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22435,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10502\/revisions\/22435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10502"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10502"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}