it.] SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 347 



method, a method so natural to our intellect, and so well 

 adjusted also to the requirements of our science, that we 

 must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to re- 

 nounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also 

 influenced the choice. Artists for ever admirable, the 

 Greeks created a type of suprasensible truth, as of sensible 

 beauty, whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we 

 incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, 

 we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, 

 once in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philoso- 

 phers moved, we are drawn along in their orbit. 



Such was the case with Leibniz, as also with Spinoza. 

 We are not blind to the treasures of originality their doc- 

 trines contain. Spinoza and Leibniz have poured into 

 them the whole content of their souls, rich with the in- 

 dentions of their genius and the acquisitions of modern 

 thought. And there are in each of them, especially in 

 Spinoza, flashes of intuition that break through the system. 

 But if we leave out of the two doctrines what breathes life 

 into them, if we retain the skeleton only, we have before 

 us the very picture of Platonism and Aristotelianism. seen 

 through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a 

 systematization of the new physics, constructed on the 

 model of the ancient metaphysics. 



What, indeed, could the unification of physics be? The 

 inspiring idea of that science was to isolate, within the uni- 

 verse, systems of material points such that, the position 

 of each of these points being known at a given moment, 

 we could then calculate it for any moment whatever. As, 

 moreover, the systems thus defined were the only ones on 

 which the new science had hold, and as it could not be 

 known beforehand whether a system satisfied or did not 

 satisfy the desired condition, it was useful to proceed always 

 and everywhere as if the condition was realized. There 



