372 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



we might quite as well look upon it as made of the 

 reciprocal complementarity of these whole views, each 

 given in block, each indivisible, each different from all 

 the others and yet representative of the same thing. 

 The Whole, that is to say, God, is this very relief for 

 Leibniz, and the monads are these complementary 

 plane views ; for that reason he defines God as &quot;the 

 substance that has no point of view,&quot; or, again, as &quot;the 

 universal harmony,&quot; that is to say, the reciprocal com 

 plementarity of monads. In short, Leibniz differs 

 from Spinoza in this, that he looks upon the universal 

 mechanism as an aspect which reality takes for us, 

 whereas Spinoza makes of it an aspect which reality 

 takes for itself. 



It is true that, after having concentrated in God the 

 whole of the real, it became difficult for them to pass 

 from God to things, from eternity to time. The diffi 

 culty was even greater for these philosophers than for 

 an Aristotle or a Plotinus. The God of Aristotle, 

 indeed, had been obtained by the compression and 

 reciprocal compenetration of the Ideas that represent, in 

 their finished state or in their culminating point, the 

 changing things of the world. He was, therefore, 

 transcendent to the world, and the duration of things 

 was juxtaposed to His eternity, of which it was only 

 a weakening. But in the principle to which we are led 

 by the consideration of universal mechanism, and which 

 must serve as its substratum, it is not concepts or things &amp;gt; 

 but laws or relations that are condensed. Now, a rela 

 tion does not exist separately. A law connects changing 

 terms and is immanent in what it governs. The prin 

 ciple in which all these relations are ultimately summed 

 up, and which is the basis of the unity of nature, can 

 not, therefore, be transcendent to sensible reality ; it is 



