Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/301

LA WS OF THOUGHT AND OF THE WORLD. 279 entrance suddenly or without the way being prepared for it, and as all extremes are bound together by connecting links and gradual transitions, — so the monad itself stands in a continuous gradation of beings, each of which is related to and different from each. Since the beings and events form a single uninterrupted series, there are no distinctions of kind in the world, but only distinctions in degree. Rest and motion are not opposites, for rest may be considered as infinitely minute motion; the ellipse and the parabola are not qualitatively different, for the laws which hold for the one may be applied to the other. Likeness is vanishing unhkeness, passivity arrested activity, evil a lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals men with infinitely little reason, plants animals with vanishing con- sciousness, fluidity a lower degree of solidity, etc. In the whole world similarity and correspondence rule, and it is everywhere the same as here — between apparent opposites there is a distinction in degree merely, and hence, analogy. In the macrocosm of the universe things go on as in the microcosm of the monad ; every later state of the world is prefigured in the earlier, etc. If, on the one side, the law of analogy follows as a consequence from the law of contin- uity, on the other, we have t& principium {identitatis) indis- cernibilium. As nature abhors gaps, so also it avoids the superfluous. Every grade in the series must be represented, but none more than once. There are no two things, no two events which are entirely alike. If they were exactly alike they would not be two, but one. The distinction between them is never merely numerical, nor merely local and tem- poral, but always an intrinsic difference : each thing is dis- tinguished from every other by its peculiar nature. This law holds both for the truly real (the monads) and for the phenomenal world — you will never find two leaves exactly alike. By the law of the conservation of force, Leibnitz corrects the Cartesian doctrine of the conservation of motion, and approaches the point of view of the present day. According to Descartes it is the sum of actual motions which remains constant ; according to Leibnitz, the sum of the active forces; while, according to the modern theory, it is the sum of the active and the latent or potential