Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/369

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ. 355 who, though inclined at first to oppose it, ultimately admitted it to be satisfactory. 1 The fact is interesting when we con- sider that the contradiction in Leibniz's account of God is the exact counterpart of the contradiction in Spinoza's view of substance. Leibniz treats God as at once an element in the system of things and a Being independent of the system, but of such a nature that the system itself seems unnecessary ; while Spinoza, as we have seen, regards God or Substance as equivalent to the Universe as one, and yet his definition of God implies that He is an element in some wider system. From opposite sides Spinoza and Leibniz fall into the same pit. In this paper I have been able to do little more than in- dicate a line of thought which, it seems to me, may be fruit- fully developed. It is easy, on the one hand, to show that Spinoza and Leibniz are both inconsistent and, on the other hand, to maintain that they both say exactly the same thing in slightly different ways. The armoury of the more recent philosophy equips us for the one task, and a collection of parallel passages might fortify us for the other. But neither of these things profits us a whit. Turning from them, I have endeavoured to show that what is admittedly implicit in the philosophy of Spinoza is made comparatively explicit in the philosophy of Leibniz, although Leibniz does not by any means thoroughly work out the consequences of his own method. And the philosophical attitude of each is, I think, very closely connected with their views of mathematics. The negative doctrine of limits, when it is thought out, issues in the positive doctrine of infinitesimals, which it presupposes. Thus Spinoza argues vigorously against the reality of final causes as involving the introduction of the negative, the finite, the determinate into substance, while in his constant references to the order and connexion of things 2 and to the conatus or self-preserving tendency in each individual thing, he presupposes that determinate system of inter-related ele- ments which his explicit argument against final causes would exclude. Leibniz, on the other hand, is concerned for nothing more than for the reality of final cause. It is the point regarding which he most sharply differs from Spinoza and in his correspondence he returns to it again and again. Nevertheless in the end he puts behind his rational or 1 Gerhardt, viL, 261. "Compare these with the passage in the appendix to part i. of the Ethics, where Spinoza attributes the belief that there is order in things to imagination, as distinct from understanding.