If A Nonnegative Quantity Was So Small

Mathematicians Have Tried In Vain To This Day To Discover Some Order In The Sequence Of Prime Numbers, And We Have Reason To Believe That It Is A Mystery Into Which The Human Mind Will Never Penetrate.

If A Nonnegative Quantity Was So Small That It Is Smaller Than Any Given One, Then It Certainly Could Not Be Anything But Zero. To Those Who Ask What The Infinitely Small Quantity In Mathematics Is, We Answer That It Is Actually Zero. Hence There Are Not So Many Mysteries Hidden In This Concept As They Are Usually Believed To Be. These Supposed Mysteries Have Rendered The Calculus Of The Infinitely Small Quite Suspect To Many People. Those Doubts That Remain We Shall Thoroughly Remove In The Following Pages, Where We Shall Explain This Calculus.

For Since The Fabric Of The Universe Is Most Perfect And The Work Of A Most Wise Creator, Nothing At All Takes Place In The Universe In Which Some Rule Of Maximum Or Minimum Does Not Appear.

Since The Fabric Of The Universe Is Most Perfect And The Work Of A Most Wise Creator, Nothing At All Takes Place In The Universe In Which Some Rule Of Maximum Or Minimum Does Not Appear ... There Is Absolutely No Doubt That Every Affect In The Universe Can Be Explained Satisfactorily From Final Causes, By The Aid Of The Method Of Maxima And Minima, As It Can Be From The Effective Causes Themselves ... Of Course, When The Effective Causes Are Too Obscure, But The Final Causes Are Readily Ascertained, The Problem Is Commonly Solved By The Indirect Method.

In The Meantime, Most Noble Sir, You Have Assigned This Question To The Geometry Of Position, But I Am Ignorant As To What This New Discipline Involves, And As To Which Types Of Problem Leibniz And Wolff Expected To See Expressed In This Way.