iv SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 373 



immanent in it, and we must suppose that it is at once 

 both in and out of time, gathered up in the unity of its 

 substance and yet condemned to wind it off in an end 

 less chain. Rather than formulate so appalling a contra 

 diction, the philosophers were necessarily led to sacrifice 

 the weaker of the two terms, and to regard the temporal 

 aspect of things as a mere illusion. Leibniz says so in 

 explicit terms, for he makes of time, as of space, a con 

 fused perception. While the multiplicity of his monads 

 expresses only the diversity of views taken of the whole, 

 the history of an isolated monad seems to be hardly 

 anything else than the manifold views that it can take 

 of its own substance : so that time would consist in all 

 the points of view that each monad can assume towards 

 itself, as space consists in all the points of view that all 

 monads can assume towards God. But the thought of 

 Spinoza is much less clear, and this philosopher seems to 

 have sought to establish, between eternity and that which 

 has duration, the same difference as Aristotle made 

 between essence and accidents : a most difficult under 

 taking, for the v\t) of Aristotle was no longer there to 

 measure the distance and explain the passage from the 

 essential to the accidental, Descartes having eliminated 

 it for ever. However that may be, the deeper we go 

 into the Spinozistic conception of the &quot; inadequate,&quot; as 

 related to the &quot; adequate,&quot; the more we feel ourselves 

 moving in the direction of Aristotelianism, -just as the 

 Leibnizian monads, in proportion as they mark them 

 selves out the more clearly, tend to approximate to the 

 Intelligibles of Plotinus. 1 The natural trend of these 



1 In a course of lectures on Plotinus, given at the College de France in 

 1897-1898, we tried to bring out these resemblances. They are numerous 

 and impressive. The analogy is continued even in the formulae employed 

 on each side. 



