Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/367

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ. 353 object, and which thus transcends that distinction. But we shall look in vain for any such system in the petites perceptions of Leibniz. It is true that he regards them as somehow having order in them, as containing implicitly a law of some sort ; but in reality he conceives them, not positively but negatively, as sensations minus consciousness, i.e., as " limits " of conscious sensations, and thus any order they may be supposed to have is not an order of their own, but the order of conscious perception read into them. There must, for example, be among conscious perceptions an order or system which is expressed in the distinctions between (say) sensations of hearing and sensations of sight. A similar order must be supposed to exist among the petites perceptions. But this second order is presupposed in a purely negative way. If we have a conscious perception of the sound of 100,000 waves, we must somehow have perception (though uncon- scious) of the sound of each ; 1 but Leibniz makes no attempt to indicate exactly how. His argument here is simply the reductio ad absurdum, which is the characteristic argument of Spinoza. And Leibniz's failure at this point accounts for the difficulty he finds in dealing with the rational or self-conscious soul. He sees clearly that the conscious in some way presupposes the unconscious ; but he has not an equally clear grasp of what is involved in the truth that the unconscious pre- supposes the conscious. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult for him to carry out his law of continuity when he comes to consider the higher parts of the scale of being. He cannot, for instance, conceive that a self-conscious soul should ever lose its self-consciousness and permanently become merely conscious or unconscious. And thus he hesitates between the hypothesis that rational souls have been raised from the rank of sensuous souls " by the extra- ordinary operation of God " and the hypoth'esis that " only those souls which are destined some day to attain to human nature contain in germ [enveloppent] the reason which will Isome day appear in them ", 2 On the whole matter Leibniz is very inconsistent and unsatisfactory ; but, whichever of his hypotheses we follow, it is evident that he did not realise 1 Nouveaiix Essais, Introduction (Erdmann, 197; Gerhardt, v., 47). One might ask why a separate petite perception for each wave and not for every possible element in each wave ? The single wave is quite an arbitrary standard for the unit of perception : there is nothing to show why it should be chosen. 2 Theodicee, 397 ; cf. 91, and Lettres a Arnauld (1686-7), Gerhardt, ii., 75 and 99 ; also Lettre a des Maizeaux (1711), Erdmann, 676 ; Gerhardt, vii., 534. 23