SOURCE: "Miracles and Laws," in The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz, edited by Kathleen Okruhlik and James Robert Brown, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1985, pp. 171-81.

In the essay below, first delivered as a seminar paper in 1982, McRae discusses Leibniz's ideas on the laws governing the natural world and argues that Leibniz categorized miracles as occurrences outside the understanding of human explanation.

Leibniz makes the charge, which he constantly renewed, that the laws of nature of the Cartesians and Newton's law of gravitation were really only formulations of perpetual miracles. To make his case he had to define miracle. Because the notion of miracle involves, at least for Leibniz, the notion of law as that to which a miraculous event is an exception, and because accordingly the criteria for miracles become inversely the criteria for laws, the entire polemic throws valuable light on Leibniz's conception of law.

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