(reasons, must remain immutably shut up in itself. True, this return to the ancient philosophy was not with- out great difficulties. \Vhen a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Flotinus melt all the concepts of their science into a single one, in so doing they embrace the whole of the real, for concepts are supposed to represent the things themselves, and to possess at least as much positive content. But a law, in general, expresses only a relation, and physical laws in particular express only qvantitaiii'e relations be- tween concrete things, So that if a modern philosopher works with the laws of the new science as the Greek philoso- pher did with the concepts of the ancient science, if he makes »all the conclusions of a physics supposed omniscient con- Verge on a single point, he neglects what is concrete in the phenomena — the qualities perceived, the perceptions them- selves. His synthesis comprises, it seems, only a fraction of reality. In fact, the first result of the new science was to cut the real into two halves, quantity and quality, the former being credited to the account of bodies and the latter to the account of souls. The ancients had raised no such barriere either between 'quahty and quantity or between soul and body. For them, the mathematical concepts were concepts hke the others, related to the others and fitting quite naturally into the hierarchy of the Ideas. Neither was the body then defined by geometrical extension,
(Ck^^^^
nor the soul by consciousness. If the (f'^x^ of Aristotle, the entelechy of a living body, is less spiritual than our "soul," it is because his o^/ui, already impregnated with the Idea, is less corporeal than our " body." The scission was not yet irremediable between the two terms. It has be- come so, and thence a mctaphysic that aims at an abstract unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthe- sis only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the absolute heterogeneity of the two halves in order to con- sider one as a translation of the other. Different phrases will express different things if they belong to the same language, that is to say, if there is a certain relationship of sound betwesn them. But if they belong to two different languages, they might, just because of their radical di- veraity of sound, express the same thmg. So of quality and quantity, of soul and body. It is for having cut all connection between the two terms that philosophers have been led to establish between them a rigorous parallelism, of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, to posit a fundamental identity as a substratum to their duality. The synthesis to which they rose thus became capable of embracing everjlhing. A divine mechanism made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, soula to bodies.
It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in Spinoza — in different forms, it is true, because of the un- equal importance which they attach to extension. With Spinoza, the two terms Thought and Extension are placed, in principle at least, in the same rank. They arc, there- fore, two translations of one and the same original, or, as Spinoza says, two attributes of one and the same substance, which we must call God. And these two translations,
H as also an inanity of others into languages which we know not, are called up and even forced into existence by the original, just as the essence of the circle is translated auto- matically, so to speak, both by a figure and by an equation. For Leibniz, on the contrary, extension is indeed still a translation, but it is thought that is the original, and thought might dispense with translation, the translation being made only for us. In positing God, we necessarily posit also all the possible views of God, that is to say, the
t monads. But we can always imagine that a view has been taken from a point of view, and it is natural for an imperfect mind like ours to class views, qualitatively different, ac- cording to the order and position of points of view, quali- tatively identical, from which the views might have been taken. In reality the points of view do not exist, for there are only views, each given in an indivisible block and representing in its ov/n way the whole of reality, which Ui God. But we need to express the plurality of the views, that are unlike each other, by the multiplicity of the points of view that are exterior to each other; and we also need to symbolize the more or less close relationship between the views by the relative situation of the points of view to one another, their nearness or their distance, that is to say, by a magnitude. That is what Leibniz means when he says that space is the order of coexistents, that the per- ception of extension is a confused perception (that is to say, a perception relative to an imperfect mind), and that nothing exists but monads, expressing thereby that the real Whole has no parts, but is repeated to infinity, each time integrally (though diversely) within itself, and that all these repetitions are complementary to each other. In just the same way, the visible relief of an object is equiva- lent to the whole set of stereoscopic views taken of it from all points, so that, instead of seeing in the relief a juxta-
352 CREATIVE EVOLUTION tOHAP.
position of solid parts, we might quite as well look tipon it as made of the reciprocal complementarity of these whole views, each given in block, each indivisible, eacii different from all the others and yet representative of the same thing. The Whole, that is to say, God, is this very relief for Leibmx, and the monads are these complementary plane views; for that reason he defines God as "the substance that has no point of view," or, again, as " the universal harmony," that is to say, the reciprocal complementarity of monads. In short, Leibniz differs from Spinoza in this, that he looks upon the universal mechanism as an aspect which reality takes for us, whereas, Spinoza makes of it an aspect which reality takes for itself.
It is true that, after having concentrated in God the whole of the real, it became difficult for them to pass from God to things, from eternity to time. The difficulty was even much greater for these philosophers than an Aristotle or a Plotinus. The God of Aristotle, indeed, had been obtained by the compression and reciprocal compene- tration of the Ideas that represent, in their finished state or in their culminating point, the changing things of the world. He was, therefore, transcendent to the world, and the duration of things was juxtaposed to His eternity, of which it was only a weakening. But in the principle to which we are led by the consideration of universal mechanism, and which must serve as its substratum, it ifl not concepts or things, but laws or relations that are condensed. Now, a relation does not exist separately. A law connects changing terms and is immanent in what it governs. The principle in which all these relations are ultimately summed up, and which is the basis of the unity of nature, cannot, therefore, be transcendent to sensible reality; it is immanent in it, and we must suppose that it IB at once both in and out of time, gathered up in the
unity of its substance and yet condemned to wind it off in an endless chain. Rather than formulate so appalling a contradiction, the philosophers were necessarily led to sacrifice the weaker of the two terms, and to regard the temporal aspect of things as a mere illusion, Leibniz says so in explicit terms, for he makes of time, as of space, a confused perception. While the multiplicity of his monads expresses only the diversity of views taken of the whole, the history of an isolated monad seems to be hardly any- thing else than the manifold views that it can take of its own substance: so that time would consist in all the points of view that each monad can assume towards itself, as space consists in all the points of view that all monads can assume towards God. But the thought of Spinoza is much less clear, and this philosopher seems to have sought to establish, between eternity and that which has duration, the same difference as Aristotle made between essence and accidents: a most difficult undertaking, for the uHij of Aristotle was no longer there to measure the distance and fffplnin the passage from the essential to the accidental, Descart«s having eliminated it for ever. However that may be, the deeper we go into the Spinozistic conception of the "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the more we feel ourselves moving in the direction of Aristote- tianism — just as the Leibnizian monads, in proportion as they mark themselves out the more clearly, tend to ap- proximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus.' The natural trend of these two philosophies brings them back to the conclusions of the ancient philosophy.
To sum up, the resemblances of this new metaphysic to that of the ancients arise from the fact that both suppose
In a course of lectures on Plotinus, given at the College de France in 1897-1898, we tried to bring out these resemblftaces. They are numerous and impressive. Tbe analogy is continued even in the formulae em- ployed on each aide.
354 Creative Evolution
ready-made — ^the former above the sensible, the latter within the sensible — a science one and complete, with which any reality that the sensible may contain is believed to coincide. For both, reality as well as truth are integraUy given in etemiiy. Both are opposed to the idea of a reality that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an ab- solute duration.
Now, it might easily be shown that the conclusions of this metaphysic, springing from science, have rebounded upon science itself, as it were, by ricochet. They penetrate the whole of our so-called empiricism. Physics and chem- istry study only inert matter; biology, when it treats the living being physically and chemically, considers only the inert side of the living: hence the mechanistic expla- nations, in spite of their development, include only a small part of the real. To suppose a -priori that the whole of the real is resolvable into elements of this kind, or at least that mechanism can ^ve a complete translation of what happens in the world, is to pronounce for a certain meta- physic— the very metaphysic of which Spinoza and Leib- niz have laid down the principles and drawn the conse- quences. Certainly, the psycho-physiologist who Actios the exact equivalence of the cerebral and the psyclucal state, who imagines the possibility, for some superhuman intellect, of reading in the brain what is going on in con- sciousness, believes himself very far from the metaphy^- cians of the seventeenth century, and very near to experi- ence. Yet experience pure and simple tells us nothing of the kind. It shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state — nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw ia