352 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



position of solid parts, 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 "the substance that has 

 no point of view," or, again, as "the universal harmony," 

 that is to say, the reciprocal complementarity 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 difficulty was 

 even much greater for these philosophers than an Aristotle 

 or a Plotinus. The God of Aristotle, indeed, had been 

 obtained by the compression and reciprocal compene- 

 tration 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, but laws or relations that are 

 condensed. Now, a relation does not exist separately. 

 A law connects changing terms and is immanent in what 

 it governs. The principle in which all these relations 

 are ultimately summed up, and which is the basis of the 

 unity of nature, cannot, therefore, be transcendent to 

 sensible reality; it is immanent in it, and we must suppose 

 that it is at once both in and out of time, gathered up in the 



