Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the ...two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it), which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Navarette, a Chinese missionary, agrees with Leibniz and says that "It is the special providence of God that the Chinese did not k...now what was done in Christendom; for if they did, there would be never a man among them, but would spit in our faces."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »