ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ S PHILOSOPHY 177 



same thing : creation would be its thought. Thus Leib- 

 niz and Kant are at one in placing the ultimate synthesis 

 of things, the sufficient reason of experience, in some- 

 thing that is beyond experience itself, and that is related 

 to experience in a way which stands in need of further 

 explanation. Leibniz, however, falls into a contradiction 

 which Kant avoids. For Leibniz regards God as at once 

 the highest of the Monads (the ultimate term in the 

 series) and the Creator of the Monads, i. e. the sufficient 

 reason of the world which they constitute. But if God 

 is one of the series of Monads, it seems impossible to 

 regard Him as their sufficient reason, as choosing to 

 create the system of which He is an element. And on 

 the other hand, if the essence of the Monads is to repre- 

 sent the universe, and if He f actuspurus) perfectly realizes 

 the universe within Himself, having perfectly clear and 

 distinct perception, what place is there for a system of 

 Monads apart from Him ? Kant avoids the difficulty by 

 the sharp distinction he draws between experience and 

 the thing-in-itself. He can thus regard God as related 

 to the world in a way which we may attempt to describe 

 as causal, creative, or otherwise, but which it is impossible 

 for us ever with certainty to define \ In short, so far as 

 our theoretical knowledge of things is concerned, the 

 account we give of the relation of God to the world is 

 simply a useful hypottiesis, by means of which we may 

 give unity to our knowledge, and avoid the fallacies of 



1 Cf. Critique of Pure Eeason (Hartenstein, ii. 508 sqq. ; Rosenkranz, 

 ii. 519 sqq.), Meiklejohn, pp. 410 sqq.: 'The notion of a supreme 

 intelligence is a mere idea, that is to say, its objective reality does 

 not consist in its being immediately referable to an object (for 

 in this sense we cannot establish its objective validity) but it is 

 merely a schema of the notion of a thing in general, a schema 

 constructed according to the conditions of the greatest unity of 

 reason, and serving only to produce the greatest systematic unity 

 in the empirical use of our reason, inasmuch as we deduce this or 

 that object of experience from the imagined object of this idea as 

 the ground or cause of the object of experience.' Cf. also Rosen- 

 kranz, ii. 598 ; Hartenstein, ii. 581 ; Meiklejohn, p. 471. 



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