350 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



nor the soul by consciousness. If the <puz^ of Aristotle, 

 the entelechy of a living body, is less spiritual than our 

 "soul," it is because his o&fia, already impregnated with the 

 Idea, is less corporeal than our "body." The scission was 

 not yet irremediable between the two terms. It has be- 

 come so, and thence a metaphysic that aims at an abstract 

 unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthe- 

 sis only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the 

 absolute heterogeneity of the two halves in order to con- 

 sider one as a translation of the other. Different phrases 

 will express different things if they belong to the same 

 language, that is to say, if there is a certain relationship 

 of sound between them. But if they belong to two different 

 languages, they might, just because of their radical di- 

 versity of sound, express the same thing. So of quality 

 and quantity, of soul and body. It is for having cut all 

 connection between the two terms that philosophers have 

 been led to establish between them a rigorous parallelism, 

 of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as 

 translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, 

 to posit a fundamental identity as a substratum to their 

 duality. The synthesis to which they rose thus became 

 capable of embracing everything. A divine mechanism 

 made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of 

 extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, souls to 

 bodies. 



It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in 

 Spinoza — in different forms, it is true, because of the un- 

 equal importance which they attach to extension. With 

 Spinoza, the two terms Thought and Extension are placed, 

 in principle at least, in the same rank. They are, there- 

 fore, two translations of one and the same original, or, as 

 Spinoza says, two attributes of one and the same substance, 

 which we must call God. And these two translations, 



