iv SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 369 



them all known, and would gather them up into a 

 unity which also would express them eminently, but 

 which, like the God of Aristotle and for the same 

 reasons, must remain immutably shut up in itself. 



True, this return to the ancient philosophy was 

 not without great difficulties. When a Plato, an 

 Aristotle, or a Plotinus melt all the concepts of their 

 science into a single one, in so doing they embrace the 

 whole of the real, for concepts are supposed to represent 

 the things themselves, and to possess at least as much 

 positive content. But a law, in general, expresses 

 only a relation, and physical laws in particular express 

 only quantitative relations between concrete things. 

 So that if a modern philosopher works with the laws of 

 the new science as the Greek philosopher did with the 

 concepts of the ancient science, if he makes all the 

 conclusions of a physics supposed omniscient converge 

 on a single point, he neglects what is concrete in the 

 phenomena the qualities perceived, the perceptions 

 themselves. His synthesis comprises, it seems, only a 

 fraction of reality. In fact, the first result of the new 

 science was to cut the real into two halves, quantity 

 and quality, the former being credited to the account 

 of bodies and the latter to the account of souls. The 

 ancients had raised no such barriers either between 

 quality and quantity or between soul and body. For 

 them, the mathematical concepts were concepts like the 

 others, related to the others and fitting quite naturally 

 into the hierarchy of the Ideas. Neither was the body 

 then defined by geometrical extension, nor the soul by 

 consciousness. If the ^v^ of Aristotle, the entelechy 

 of a living body, is less spiritual than our &quot; soul,&quot; it 

 is because his o-ayta, already impregnated with the Idea, 

 is less corporeal than our &quot; body.&quot; The scission was 



2 B 



