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If the position of those was difficult who tried to keep themselves strictly within the limits of science, how much more fraught with personal danger was the position of those who openly constructed a new metaphysics? It would mean that a challenge was issued to the old Scholasticism by the same human reason that had already challenged and overthrown the old science. The group of men who did this were the Rationalists. The Rationalists were interested in science, but they were more interested in the metaphysical problems that science aroused. The human reason had been successful in the reconstruction of physics by the use of mathematics. Why should it not also be able to reconstruct metaphysics and set it, too, upon a mathematical basis? The leaders of this school were Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the Occasionalists,--Malebranche and Geulincx. The Rationalists advanced a new conception not only of nature, but of God; new theories not only of the human body, but of the soul. Their task was the dangerous one of bravely invading the hitherto impregnable realms of the spirit.

The task of the Rationalists was rendered the more difficult because, for the first time in the history of European thought, the inner and outer worlds had been completely sundered. For the first time do we meet with a clear-cut and positive dualism. The history of the growth of this dualism had been a long one, and to it the Greek Sophist, the Stoic, and the Christian had each contributed his share. However, Galileo and his fellow scientists in this period of the Renaissance had so reconstructed the old "world of nature" that it had become irreconcilable to the "world of grace." These scientists believed that nature must be made to explain itself; its events must be conceived as necessitated; its processes as having the inevitableness of a machine. From the revolutions of the planets to the circulation of the blood, the movements of nature can be measured. The law of nature, that is conceived to underlie all this science, is mechanical causation. The researches of the scientists of the Renaissance had yielded a rich world of brute, inevitable, and scientific facts, and these stood in absolute fundamental contrast to the world of spiritual facts which were embodied in the church dogma. Apparently the problem of reconciling the "world of nature" and the "world of grace" had been solved by St. Thomas Aquinas in mediaeval times. Now, however, the "world of nature" had been so reconstructed that the question was re-opened. How is the new "world of nature" to be brought into harmonious relation with that old, persistent, and settled dogma of the church? How can the newly conceived mechanism of nature be harmonized with the realm of free conscious spirits, without giving up the conception of God as a rational being, and also without depriving the soul of its power of initiation? The new science had therefore made it especially difficult on the one hand to reconcile a mechanical universe with an omnipotent God, and on the other to reconcile the mechanical human body with the free soul.

The struggle of the Renaissance with the Middle Ages is therefore concentrated in the development of the doctrine of this Rationalist School. It is studied here even better than by reading the two periods side by side. In Rationalism the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the Science of the Renaissance meet. Rationalism was a new science, but it was a new theology as well. It was a new scholastic philosophy; for, while the Rationalists thought that they were giving the death blow to mediaeval philosophy, they were instead only replacing it with another scholasticism. In their attempt, by means of the mechanical theory, to get an absolute system of knowledge upon which thought can rest, the Rationalists were acting in the spirit of the schoolmen. In fact, no schoolman ever showed more vigor or more dogmatic confidence in his philosophy. To the mathematical eye of the Rationalist there was absolutely nothing mysterious in the physical universe or in the spiritual realm. All things in heaven and earth could be made clear. The declaration of the Rationalists was the call of freedom, but it was as hazardous as it was ambitious; and the church with its assured revelations always stood opposed to the realization of freedom. So we shall find Descartes spending his whole life trying to trim his sails that he may not offend the Inquisition; Spinoza saving himself from both the Jews and the Christians by living in obscurity and publishing nothing; Leibnitz constructing philosophy with the avowed purpose of reconciling science and religion.

At home until he was eight years old .

At the Jesuit school at La Fl?che until he was seventeen .

At Paris , in retirement and study.

In Holland , nominally attached to the army of Maurice.

First Journey , going through Bavaria, Austria, north to the shores of the Baltic and back to Holland. The greater part of these two years were spent in Bohemia, enrolled in the army of the Emperor. He was on this journey when his mental crisis occurred,--at Neuberg, in Austria, in 1619. It was then that he discovered either analytical geometry or the fundamental principle of his philosophy.

In Paris again, 1623.

Second Journey , to Switzerland and Italy, making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Loretto.

In Holland . For the sake of absolute seclusion from inquisitive visitors, Descartes changed his residence in Holland twenty-four times and lived in thirteen places. All his correspondence passed through Mersenne. During these twenty years he made three journeys to France. Thus this period of absolute retirement became his period of literary production, chiefly between the years 1635 and 1644. He wrote his

The rival spirit speaking in Descartes was the new scientific spirit of the Renaissance. He had a genius for mathematics even when he was at school at La Fl?che. On his going to Paris he became the centre of the most notable scientific circle in France--a circle composed of such men as the Abb? Claude Picot, the physician Villebressieux, the optician Ferrier, the mathematician Mersenne, and many other scientists and theologians. But he became dissatisfied and made some long journeys in order to study "the book of the world." His discovery of his method and his philosophical principle was the result. In mathematics he was the discoverer of analytical geometry and was the first to represent powers by exponents; in physics he stated the principle of the refraction of light in trigonometrical form; he explained the rainbow; he weighed the air. The same industrious application of the new scientific methods that yielded great results in science, also resulted in his development of his philosophy. Love for original discovery made Descartes disdainful of all scientific authorities and even contemptuous of his notable contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey. He mentions by name Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Campanella, Telesio, and Bruno, but he claimed that he learned nothing from any one except Kepler. He felt himself to be above criticism, and in his self-arrogating dogmatism he is the type of the modern practical individualist. He defined truth as candor to one's self, and both in his practical life and in his theoretical ideal there is an entire absence of utilitarianism.

Two are ontological arguments, that is, arguments from the character of the conception of God's nature.

The reader will recognize this as a re-statement of the argument by St. Anselm. As such it raised a tempest of controversy in Descartes' time, and was attacked from all sides.

Two are causal arguments, that is, based on the assumption of the equality of cause and effect. Only one of these arguments will be cited here. This is known as

The ontological arguments given by Descartes are evidently deductions from the certainty of self-consciousness. The question which we immediately raise concerning them is, Are they true? As to the causal arguments, Descartes is breaking away from his original assumption, viz., that self-consciousness is the only certainty, and is introducing another assumption, viz., the certainty of the law of cause. The question, then, that the thoughtful student asks, is, Does Descartes really escape from his solipsism?

"God's in His heaven-- All's right with the world."

Of course, man is constantly in error about the character of physical things, but these errors arise from his misinterpretation of them. Nature in some form lies before man, or else God in His truthfulness does not exist. The essence of matter is extension , and whatever my interpretation of it, something extended lies before me to be interpreted.

This is the skeleton upon which Descartes constructs his theory. Even this cursory examination of it shows the obvious attempt to explain "the world of grace" by the method of mathematics, and it is quite consistent with the spirit of the Renaissance. The existence of God and the existence of matter are deduced in turn from the axiom of all thought, the Self; while matter is further described as the extended or the measurable. Thus Descartes has tried to construct a bridge between the scholastic concepts and the science of the Renaissance. The three realities, the Self, God, and matter, which Descartes often speaks of as intuitively certain, have obviously a differing cogency. The reality of consciousness is the ground from which the other two are derived. In asserting its primacy, he is voicing the spirit of the Renaissance even more clearly than did Galileo and Bacon. For Descartes in this has gone back of the objective facts to a single subjective principle; whereas the deductive principles of Galileo were objective. In this respect Descartes is the founder of the subjective method of modern thought, and in identifying the Self as the reason he became the founder of rationalism. In any case he established a background for epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. But in his derivation of the other two realities--God and matter--he shows how persistent was the scholastic current in his thought. Although he declared them to be intuitively known, they evidently are not so in the same sense that self-consciousness is; and he felt obliged to support them by traditional scholastic arguments.

There was little trouble for Descartes in conceiving the movements of inanimate bodies, plants, and all the lower animals as purely mechanical and automatic, with their first cause in God. From his own investigations he felt obliged to regard many of the human functions as automatic also. But his ethical and theological interests compelled him to think of man as exalted above the rest of creation. Theology has always been in a sense aristocratic, and has drawn a line between man and other things. Man alone has a soul in his body. The soul of man is immortal and free, and must therefore have control over the body; nevertheless the soul of man must be conscious of the impressions that come through the body. Here the science of the Renaissance and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages refuse to be reconciled in the philosophy of Descartes. When it became a question between Descartes' scientific theory of matter operating itself mechanically and the church doctrine of a spiritual will operating the matter of the human body, the scientific theory had to yield. How does Descartes yield gracefully to the theological requirements and bring together the two unlike worlds of matter and mind in the human personality?

Descartes' explanation of the relation of human mind and body reminds us of the mythical explanations of Paracelsus. The soul is united to all parts of the body, but its point of contact with the body is the pineal gland, and this contact is made possible through the animal spirits or the fire atoms in the blood, a revived Greek conception. The pineal gland is a ganglion in the centre of the brain, which biologists tell us is a defunct eye, but which Descartes conceived to be the seat of the soul. Descartes maintained that the animal spirits, having been distilled by the heart, ascend by mechanical laws from the heart to the brain, and then descend to the nerves and muscles. When they pass through the pineal gland, they come in contact with the soul. The soul exercises influence on the body by slightly moving the gland and diverting the animal spirits. In this way the emotions and sensations are to be explained. The movement of the pineal gland by the animal spirits causes sensations in the soul; the movement of the gland by the soul changes the movement of the animal spirits, and is an exhibition of free action. But this does not add to or subtract from the energy. It merely changes the direction of energy.

Descartes' method had a peculiar fate. His followers misunderstood it, exactly reversed it, and obtained very fruitful results. Descartes himself had hoped to see induction employed in most metaphysical problems. He regarded deduction as of use only in proceeding from one self-evident fact to another. But the following Rationalists used the deductive method entirely and tried to systematize ethics after the manner of Euclid. They deduced their systems from some assumed principle. This tendency was first seen in the Port Royal logic, and was completed by Spinoza.

says that only three of the portraits of Spinoza may reasonably be considered authentic. One is a miniature of the philosopher in the Summer Palace at the Hague; the second is a painting in the Town Museum at the Hague; the third is the one given here, which is an engraving found in copies of the original edition of Spinoza's Posthumous Works . This portrait seems to be somewhat idealized, but of the three it is the most artistic and lifelike.)

Spinoza strove before everything else for a unitary system, and yet it is interesting to see how much he has been honored from different quarters. Artists, religious devotees, poets, idealists, materialists, and scientists have found in him their truest expression. This is not only because each has found something different, but because his philosophy had actually a many-sided character. His teaching had the advantage of being thoroughly radical. Bad systems of philosophy are impossible, because they are contradictory. While no one knows that any system corresponds to fact, still it is possible that a radical system may have such correspondence. Spinoza's system is comprehensive, and therefore has struck sympathetic chords in differing thinkers.

However, his separation from the Synagogue at this early age could not but modify his theology. It made him a free Jew. He was no longer under the restraints of Jewish traditions. While he never abandoned his belief in God as a unity, he gave up his belief in the transcendent theistic God of the Hebrew prophets; and he differed from the contemporary Jewish Cabalistic teaching of emanations from God. He seems to have so modified the orthodox Hebrew conception of God that it rather resembles that of the mediaeval mystic Christian. Perhaps the influence of Bruno upon his thought may account for its final shape.

From Spinoza's effort to simplify matters emerged three central problems: The problem of the all-inclusiveness of God--the problem of pantheism; The problem of the unity of God--the problem of mysticism; The problem of the salvation of man--an ethical problem. We shall now consider these problems in order.

No person ever had the idea of infinity so profoundly as did Spinoza. His idea of infinity is not merely that of the infinity of time and space, which indeed affords a tremendous variety of possible constructions, since space and time are each infinite. To Spinoza the infinity of the substance is much more than these possible combinations of time and space, for corresponding to the time and space series is a series of mental states. Every event has a reason. Every one of the infinity of events in the world of extension is paralleled by some state of thought. But this is by no means the whole story about Spinoza's conception of infinity. Besides the infinite world of time and space and the infinite world of corresponding thought, the substance to Spinoza possesses an infinity of other attributes, each of which is infinite. Spinoza piles up infinities upon infinities, and thus conceives the substance as an infinity in an overwhelming sense. Only two of the infinite modes appear to our limited human discernment: the infinity of the mode of extension, and the infinity of the mode of thought.

Spinoza begins at once to tell us about the forms in which the all-inclusive God appears to us. First, the substance has two attributes, thought and extension. An attribute is "that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of the substance." Each attribute in its turn manifests itself in modes: thought appears in the modes of intellect and will, extension in the modes of rest and motion.

This bare skeleton of our rich and varied world appears very much the same as that which one might find beneath Descartes' philosophy. However, Spinoza's conception of substance transforms it into a framework of a very different kind of philosophy. Since God is the inclusive reality of it all, we have here a pantheism instead of a dualism. The antithesis which in Descartes' philosophy was between extension and thought, now in Spinoza's teaching is between God and other things.

What is the place of the attributes and modes in the all-embracing and real substance? As to the attributes, Spinoza maintained that we, as finite beings, do not know God in His character as substance, but that He always appears to us through His attributes of thought and extension. There are only these two attributes that the human mind can know, although God as an infinite being must possess an infinite number of such attributes. In our human world all things are either thought-things or extension-things. Each of these two attributes is infinite after its kind. Each fully expresses an aspect of God without depreciating the value of the other. Each is fully adequate, just as a table may be both white and hard without either quality infringing upon the other. The attributes are the substance made more concrete. The modes are in turn modifications of the attributes and more concrete expressions of them and of the substance. Each mode is infinite after its kind. Since God exists only in reality, He would not supposably see from His point of view the world laid out in attributes and modes; for these are only human ways of interpreting Him. While the critics agree that the modes are human interpretations of the attributes and therefore unreal, they disagree about the relation of the attributes to God. Some maintain that the attributes are merely human ways of seeing the substance, analogously to the modes--as if we saw God now as thought and now as extension; others maintain that God is nothing other than the sum of the attributes; of extension, thought, and the unknown, infinite, other attributes. The difficulty lays bare the nerve of the problem of pantheism, and probably Spinoza was not clear in his own mind about the relation of the attributes to the substance.

Moreover, the delineation of the finite world with God as a background, as it appears from the point of view of a human being, is an inadequate presentation of Spinoza's profound conception of God. For the substance is not merely a neutral point nor the central point of the universe. The substance is all. All things have neither their explanation nor their existence in themselves. God alone has an existence that explains itself, and He is the reality and essence of all finite things. God is immanent in the world. Just as the sides of a triangle get their meaning from the triangle itself, so the significance of the attributes and modes of the substance lies in the substance.

Human salvation and freedom consist in being like God; bondage consists in being unlike Him, in mistaking the unreality of life for His reality. We are endowed with the ability of forming an adequate idea of God by means of our reason, but we are also endowed with the faculties of sensation, emotion, and imagination. The latter faculties make man a passive creature, for they bring him into dependence upon the things that act upon him and into bondage to them. We are passive when our activities are limited by such limited objects. While a passion seems to be the most active and turbulent of our faculties, if we look at it more closely, we find that instead of being active ourselves during a passion, we are being acted upon by an external object. Only as we are purely rational,--only through the reason,--are we purely active. It is then that we are like God, free like Him, and then do we rise from insignificance to greatness. Then we transcend our false ideas of freedom and become necessary beings, for in God freedom is necessity.

To be free from the passions and the finite things of the world we must understand their nature; for to understand a thing is to be delivered from it. An illusion is not an illusion when we know it to be such. To see that all the passions, sensations, imaginations, and all the other modes of thought are human limitations, is to dwell within the reason. Spinoza's freedom is not, as will be seen, freedom in the ordinary psychological meaning of the term, but is the metaphysical freedom of being identical with the deity and determined by no finite thing. Freedom is rational knowledge. Nevertheless, freedom is ethical also, for it consists in overcoming the passions by reason. Freedom, therefore, has two sides: an escape from the emotions and an escape from obscure ideas--the goal in both cases being the life of reason. To attain freedom is to see the world as God sees it, which is the same as the reason sees it. This is to see each finite thing as eternal. Any concrete thing may be regarded by the human being as a finite and isolated thing out of all relation to other objects; or the same thing may be regarded as a detail of infinity. Looked at by itself, a thing is seen partially and falsely, for no finite thing has its explanation in itself. It is, however, seen truly when it is regarded, to use Spinoza's own celebrated phrase, "under a certain form of eternity" . This conception of eternity is one of the most admirable in Spinoza's teaching. When man rises through the reason to the consciousness of the eternity of the truth of a thing, the thing itself is transformed, and the man himself has gained salvation. Any circle that I may draw is imperfect, every leaf upon the forest trees is defective, all moral activities are wanting, if regarded in their time-limitations. But below all the imperfections of the universe is its absolute mathematical perfectness. There is nothing so abortive and evil that it does not have its aspect of eternity. Side by side with Spinoza's conception of infinity is his conception of eternity. Infinity is everlastingness, eternity is quality of being. Eternity has no reference to time. One minute may be eternal. The infinity of the substance is one aspect; the eternity of the substance is another. That eternity gained through the reason is salvation and immortality. God is reason, and by the act of the reason do we become one with Him. Our knowledge is, therefore, the measure of our morality. Knowledge and morality are the same; and whatever increases our understanding is morally good; whatever diminishes our understanding is morally wrong.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the philosopher, there is nothing in the world that is morally good or bad,--nothing which merits his hatred, love, fear, contempt, or pity,--since all that occurs is necessary. The philosopher's knowledge of the determinism of the world lifts him above the usually conceived world of finite things to this mystic world, reconstructed by his intellectual love of nature or God. Love for God will give to everything its proper value. It is the highest form of human activity. Love for God is an absolutely disinterested feeling, and is not therefore like human love, which is the passing from a less state to a greater. Love for God is peace, resignation, and contentment, for it is oneness with God. In fact, the love of man for God is the love of God for man; it is the love of God for Himself, since man cannot love God without becoming God. Thus man intellectually recognizes his oneness with God, and rejoices. Immortality is absorption in the eternal and necessary substance of the world. It is a common misconception that immortality is duration after death; immortality consists in looking at things under the aspect of eternity. The finite man perishes, but man's real self, which is God, survives.

In spite of his many successes, the life of Leibnitz was not happy. From death or other causes his noble patrons changed, until he was left without a patron. His life went from bad to worse, and his death occurred almost unnoticed.

The seventy years of Leibnitz's life fall into four periods. That he passed through three of these periods by the time he was thirty shows the voracity and versatility of his mental powers during their formative and acquisitive state. It also reveals the unusual length of his productive period,--from his thirtieth to his seventieth year. Ten years after his productive period began, when he was forty, he had completed his philosophical theory, so that the last thirty years of his life were free for its elaboration and elucidation, and in part for his departure from it. The details of Leibnitz's life are as follows:--

Not only the content, but the form of his philosophy was determined by his mathematical studies. His philosophical diction is remarkably lucid. Mathematics reinforced his early resolve "in words to attain clearness and in matter usefulness." His later discussions contain many terms that he had borrowed directly from mathematics.

Pietism had been one of the movements in Germany during the recovery of the country from the Thirty Years' War, and it represented the best side of German civilization at that time. It was a reaction on the one side against the mechanical theory of the scientists, and on the other against the destructive strife of the old and new confessions. The mother of Leibnitz was not only a Protestant, but also a Pietist, so that the subject of religion early formed an important part of her son's training. When he entered the diplomatic service of the Elector of Mainz the question of religious reconciliation took practical form for him. No doubt his philosophy as a theory of reconciliation grew out of such practical issues, as they were presented to him at Mainz. Leibnitz had, therefore, a part in the religious reaction in Germany in the last of the seventeenth century, which aimed to reconcile the divergent interests of religion and science. He tried to effect this in no external way, by patching together irreconcilable elements, but in an internal way, by an examination of fundamental principles. With his early training, his theological reading, and his wide public experience, Leibnitz was fitted to take a prominent part in the movement for reconciliation.

Leibnitz thus shows the fundamental principles upon which knowledge is based, but what does he say about the logical method of their combination? Nothing. No one would ever suspect from Leibnitz's philosophical remains that he had planned a system of philosophy according to the method of Spinoza. The many pamphlets of Leibnitz on many scattered subjects show how far short he fell of his ideal of a universal philosophical calculus. He was too versatile, his interests were too diversified, to carry through so slow and plodding a task. He merely stated the principles upon which a systematic symbolic philosophy might rest, without developing these principles in a logical way. Like Bacon, Leibnitz conceived a method that was more of a hope than an accomplishment.

There are three kinds of points, or units, or "simples." There is the mathematical point, which is simple enough, but it is only imaginary. There is the physical point, or atom, which is real but not simple. There is, lastly, the metaphysical point, or monad, which is both real and simple. The metaphysical point is the only true point. To call the material atoms real, only shows "the feebleness of the imagination, which is glad to rest, and is, therefore, in haste to make an end of division and analysis."

Leibnitz came to philosophy with a mind saturated with the mathematical ideas of the continuous, the infinitesimal, and the possible. He thought of the monads as potentialities or possibilities. He looked upon the world as essentially a developing world. Behind the facts that seem to us inflexible, lies the great world of generating force. Explanation of the actual can be made only in view of what the actual may be and has been. Let us enlarge the scope of man by so widening his conception of the actual that it will include the possible. Leibnitz also spoke of the monads as infinitesimal. He thereby lifted the conception of the infinitesimal from the realm of mathematics into that of metaphysics, just as Hobbes universalized the conception of mechanics by lifting it to metaphysics. Leibnitz, therefore, did not regard the limits of perception as the limits of nature: the reality of a nature object must be too small to be the object of perception. In the same way he made use of his mathematical conception of continuity. Leibnitz's conception of nature-continuity is one of his contributions to philosophy. Within itself the world of nature consists of a continuous gradation from the lower to the higher forms; and also the world of nature is continuous with the world of the spirit. There are no leaps in the series from matter to God. Seeming differences in kind are only differences in degree; for example, evil is only the absence of good; matter is only an obscure idea of spirit.

But this Leibnitzian atomism consists of soul-atoms. These monads, these force-centres are souls, and the mathematical qualities have a place in Leibnitz's description of the psychical powers of the monad. The monad is a soul, for soul is the only substance in the universe that may pass through many changes and it, itself, not change. The self is the only subject of which many predicates may be asserted, while it, itself, may not be the predicate of any other subject. The idea of myself underlies all my mental states. The monad is an entelechy, or an entity having its purpose within itself. All its attributes are contained within itself, and it is, therefore, by nature, sufficient unto itself. It is an individual which passes from one state to another, moved by its "constitutional appetition."

Among the psychical powers none is more important in Leibnitz's description of the monad than its power of representation. Representation is the general function of the monad--from the lowest to the highest monad. This means that each monad is the world force, yet in a particular form,--a world substance, but in some peculiar aspect. Every monad is a microcosm. Each represents the world so far as it is conscious of its own activity. But it is evident that all things in the universe are not conscious, and therefore all soul-monads are not conscious. In souls there are, therefore, more than conscious thoughts--there are thoughts that are unconscious. Among the Rationalists Leibnitz is the first to give significance to the so-called unconscious states that form so important a place in modern psychology. As a wave is composed of small particles of water, so the mind is made up of a myriad of unconscious states. The conscious state is the general effect of the whole. A soul-monad contains in itself at all times representations of the whole world, some obscure, some clear. This power of universal representation makes the monad a microcosm. What we call knowledge of the external world is our representation of it within ourselves. This representation is possible to us because we reproduce it in miniature. Since the monad directly perceives only itself and its own states, it follows that the more clearly and distinctly it is conscious of its own activities, the more adequately does it represent the cosmos. The converse is also true--that the more a monad represents the cosmos, the more truly does it represent itself.

Metaphysically the monads are isolated, yet in nature as we see them, they live in groups, and compose the things which we call plants, animals, and men. An organic thing is a combination of monads with a central ruling monad. This central monad is the soul of the group; the subordinate ones form the body of the organism. The influence of the soul or ruling monad upon the body-monads is purely ideal. They all strive for the same end, which the soul represents more clearly. The group acts spontaneously and together, not from any outside influence. An inanimate object differs from such a living organism, inasmuch as it is a group of monads without a soul or a ruling, central monad; and therefore such a monad is both soul and body. There is therefore no dualism between soul and body in any creatures, for body is only obscure or unconscious activity. The body consists of monads having a confused sense of their activity.

This continuity and unity within the world, as Leibnitz sees it, is only the logical development of the unity with which he originally endowed his monads. Although he starts the monads as "windowless," he also says that "they mirror the universe." They are so conceived as to be originally physically separated, but psychologically and ideally united. "Their natural harmony resides in an ideal of perfect activity, while in actual existence they are independent." The ideal which unites them is God, the last term in the graded series of the monads. He is the monad of monads, because He is perfect, conscious activity. Just as the various groups of monads are ruled by a central soul-monad, so the world of these groups is an hierarchy, which derives its unitary and harmonious character from this dominating monad. The world may be likened to a pyramid with God at the apex. The world is like a machine which differs from other machines, in that its parts are little machines. Although the parts seem to operate separately, they are under the dominating control of God. God is their intrinsic unity and the universe is a pre?stablished harmony.

A comparison with Spinoza's conception of the world of nature brings out Leibnitz's meaning effectively. Both philosophers conceive nature phenomena to be under the law of mechanical causation. To Spinoza, however, all phenomena are qualitatively alike; there are no grades or distinctions of value between them. All are modes of substance and all illusions in the sight of God. To Spinoza phenomena are homogeneous. Leibnitz's estimate of the world of nature is quite different, and for him nature has a far richer endowment. The phenomena of nature are not homogeneous. Their difference does not consist in their content, but in the degree in which they represent the universe. The law of nature is a unifying principle that gives unitary individuality to the members under the law. The individuality of the terms of the nature-series is implied in the very nature of the law of necessity, and on the other hand, the individual terms, for their part, transform the law of necessity into a principle of unity that is higher than bare necessity. In a necessitated series, Leibnitz points out, each term is determined by the preceding, and in turn each term determines the events that follow. Thus, while nature phenomena are a series and a necessitated series, it is a series whose existence depends upon each event having not only its place, but its unique place. No other event can fill that place, and the conditions that give the event its place constitute its individuality. Every finite event has, so to speak, its formula, and this gives individuality to each term of the series, which appeared to Spinoza only as a homogeneous, mathematical, and characterless mode. Life is meaningful to Leibnitz, because each member of the necessitated series of events has its unique part to play. The changes of life are to Spinoza void of meaning, because he conceives them to be undifferentiated. The law of mechanical necessity became under Leibnitz's hands a principle of harmony, a teleological principle. Even in the necessitated mathematical series, such as Spinoza conceived the world to be, Leibnitz believed that necessity implies individuality and individuality implies purpose.

The best possible world is a world of free agents, whose acts are rewarded or punished according to their deserts. If we discover what seems to be inexplicable evil, we must regard it as an incident in the harmony of the whole. The world would be less good without evil. There is no more evil than there ought to be. The world which God conceived to be the best possible--this world--is a world of lights and shades. Evil comes from the free agency of man, and God is not responsible for it. It is better to have evil and free agency than no evil and no free agency. Evil after all is not positive, and is only due to the indistinct ideas of man. It is the absence of good, as cold is the absence of heat.

Thus a pre?stablished harmony was constructed by Leibnitz that does not come out of his original philosophical premises. Leibnitz used his celebrated figure of the two clocks to illustrate the harmony of the monads. Two clocks keep the same time, not because they influence one another , nor because the maker moves the hands of one , but because they have been thus constructed by an intelligent Creator. Thus the harmony of the world implies a personal God. Leibnitz's philosophical Rationalism here passed into theology, and his metaphysics became an ethics. Leibnitz began with a monadology, and by means of the conception of harmony passed to an optimism.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man."

The Enlightenment marks, therefore, the rise of modern individualism; and the concerns of the individual become the important object of consideration. The novelty of the great discoveries and inventions of the Renaissance had lost its lustre. The "new universe" had become old and familiar, but through his accomplishments the "new man" had begun to feel the strength of his liberated powers. For had not the wonderful world of the Renaissance been his own accomplishment? Had not all its notable constructions been the creations of his powers? The "struggle of traditions" to revive antiquity and to incorporate the "new universe" upon an old basis; the "strife of methods" to reorganize the "new world" upon a new basis--revealed this great fact: that man has "world wisdom." Man in his supremacy occupies the entire foreground, and interest in the "new universe" fades away. The "new universe" is now seen in the light of one's personal interests. Man is supreme, and to his word there can be no exception. There is constant reference during this time to the "light of reason"--to a bright inner, rational illumination in contrast to the vagaries of mysticism and the obscurities of dogmatism. The worship of genius arises and with it a contempt for the unenlightened. "Thus would I speak, were I Christ," said Bahrdt. No wonder that Goethe described the Enlightenment as an age of self-conceit!

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