iv.] SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 353 



unity of its substance and yet condemned to wind it off in 

 an endless chain. Rather than formulate so appalling a 

 contradiction, 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 

 confused 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 any- 

 thing 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 undertaking, for the uXr) 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 "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the 

 more we feel ourselves moving in the direction of Aristote- 

 lianism — just as the Leibnizian monads, in proportion as 

 they mark themselves out the more clearly, tend to ap- 

 proximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus. 1 The natural 

 trend of these two philosophies brings them back to the 

 conclusions of the ancient philosophy. 



To sum up, the resemblances of this new metaphysic 

 to that of the ancients arise from the fact that both suppose 



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 em- 

 ployed on each side. 



