which becomes demonstrative by the new kind of harmony which I have introduced,--pre-established harmony. Since each substance expresses in its own way that which occurs beyond it, and can have no influence on other particular beings, it is necessary that each substance, before developing these phenomena from the depth of its own being, must have received this nature (this internal ground of external phenomena) from a universal cause from whom all beings depend, and which effects that one be perfectly in accord with and corresponding to every other. This cannot occur except through a being of infinite knowledge and power."
Having determined the existence of God, Leibniz states his attributes. These may be reduced to three. He is perfect in power, in wisdom, and in goodness. "Perfection is nothing other than the whole of positive reality separated from the limits and bounds of things. Where there are no limits, as in God, perfection is absolutely infinite." "In God exists _power_, which is the source of all _knowledge_,--which comprehends the realm of ideas, down to its minutest detail,--and _will_, which directs all creations and changes according to the principle of the best." Or as he expands it at another time: "The supreme cause must be intelligent, for the existing world being contingent, and an infinity of other worlds being equally possible, it is necessary that the cause of the world take into consideration all these possible worlds in order to decide upon one. Now this relation of a substance to simple ideas must be the relation of understanding to its ideas, while deciding upon one is the act of will in choosing. Finally it is the power of this substance which executes the volition. Power has its end in being; wisdom, or understanding, in truth; and will in good. Thus the cause must be absolutely perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness. His understanding is the source of essences, and his will the origin of existences."
This brings us to the relation of God to the world, or to an account of the creating activity of God. This may be considered to be metaphysically, logically, or morally necessary. To say that it is metaphysically necessary is to say that it is the result of the divine essence, that it would imply a contradiction of the very being of God for the world not to be and not to be as it is. In short, the world becomes a mere emanation of power, since, as we have just learned, power and being are correlative. But this leaves out of account the divine understanding. Not all possible worlds emanate from God's being, but there is recognition of them and of their relations to one another. Were the world to proceed from the divine understanding alone, however, it would be logically necessary,--that is, it would bear the same relation to his understanding that necessary truths do. Its opposite would imply contradiction, not indeed of the being of God, but of his understanding. But the will of God plays the all-important part of choosing among the alternative worlds presented by reason, each of which is _logically_ possible. One of these worlds, although standing on the same intellectual plane as the others, is _morally_ better,--that is, it involves greater happiness and perfection to the creatures constituting it. God is guided then by the idea of the better (and this is the best possible) world. His will is not arbitrary in creating: it does not work by a _fiat_ of brute power. But neither is it fatalistic: it does not work by compulsory necessity. It is both free and necessary; free, for it is guided by naught excepting God's own recognition of an end; necessary, for God, being God, cannot _morally_ act otherwise than by the principle of the better,--and this in contingent matters is the best. Hence the optimism of Leibniz, to which here no further allusion can be made.
Since the best is precisely God himself, it is evident that the created world will have, _as far as possible_, his perfections. It would thus be possible to deduce from this conception of God and his relation to the world all those characteristics of the Leibnizian monadology which we formerly arrived at analytically. God is individual, but with an infinite comprehensiveness. Each substance repeats these properties of the supreme substance. There is an infinity of such substances, in order that the world may as perfectly as possible mirror the infinity of God. Each, so far as in it lies, reflects the activity of God; for activity is the very essence of perfection. And thus we might go through with the entire list of the properties of the monad.
To complete the present discussion, however, it is enough to notice that intelligence and will must be found in every creature, and that thus we account for the "appetition" and the "perception" that characterize even the lowest monad. The scale of monads, however, would not be as complete as possible unless there were beings in whom appetition became volition, and perception, self-conscious intelligence. Such monads will stand in quite other relation to God than the blind impulse-governed substances. "Spirits," says Leibniz, "are capable of entering into community with God, and God is related to them not only as an inventor to his machine (as he is to other creatures) but as a prince to his subjects, or, better, as a father to his children. This society of spirits constitutes the city of God,--the most perfect state under the most perfect monarch. This city of God, this truly cosmopolitan monarchy, is a moral world within the natural. Among all the works of God it is the most sublime and divine. In it consists the true glory of God, for there would be no glory of God unless his greatness and goodness were known and admired by spirits; and in his relation to this society, God for the first time reveals his goodness, while he manifests everywhere his power and wisdom. And as previously we demonstrated a perfect harmony between the two realms of nature,--those of efficient and final causes,--so must we here declare harmony between the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace,--that is, between God as the architect of the mechanical world-structure, and God as the monarch of the world of spirits." God fulfils his creation, in other words, in a realm of spirits, and fulfils it because here there are beings who do not merely reflect him but who enter into relations of companionship with him, forming a community. This community of spirits with one another and with God is the moral world, and we are thus brought again to the ethics of Leibniz.
It has been frequently pointed out that Leibniz was the first to give ethics the form which it has since kept in German philosophy,--the division into _Natur-recht_ and _Natur-moral_. These terms are difficult to give in English, but the latter corresponds to what is ordinarily called "moral philosophy," while the former is political philosophy so far as that has an ethical bearing. Or the latter may be said to treat of the moral ideal and of the moral motive and of duty in themselves, while the former deals with the social, the public, and in a certain sense the external, aspects of morality.
Puffendorf undoubtedly suggested this division to Leibniz by his classification of duties as external and internal,--the first comprehending natural and civil law, the second moral theology. But Puffendorf confined the former to purely external acts, excluding motives and intentions, and the latter to divine revelation. Both are "positive," and in some sort arbitrary,--one resting merely on the fact that certain institutions obtain, the other on the fact that God has made certain declarations. To Leibniz, on the other hand, the will of God is in no sense the source of moral truths. The will of God does not create truth, but carries into effect the eternal truths of the divine understanding. Moral truths are like those of mathematics. And again, there is no such thing as purely external morality: it always contains an inner content, of which the external act is only the manifestation. Leibniz may thus be said to have made two discoveries, or rather re-discoveries: one, that there is a science of morals, independent of law, custom, and positive right; the other, that the basis of both "natural" and "positive" morals is not the mere will of God, but is reason with its content of eternal truths.
In morals the end is happiness, the means wisdom. Happiness is defined, not as an occurrence, but as a condition, or state of being. "It is the condition of permanent joy. This does not mean that the joy is actually felt every moment, but that one is in the condition to enjoy whenever he thinks of it, and that, in the interval, joyfulness arises from his activity and being." Pleasure, however, is not a state, but a feeling. It is the feeling of perfection, whether in ourselves or in anything else. It does not follow that we perceive intellectually either in what the perfection of the pleasant thing consists or in what way it develops perfection within us. It is enough that it be realized in feeling, so as to give us pleasure. Perfection is defined "as increase of being. As sickness is, as it were, a lowering and a falling off from health, so perfection is something which mounts above health. It manifests itself in power to act; for all substance consists in a certain power, and the greater the power the higher and freer the substance. But power increases in the degree that the many manifests itself from one and in one, while the one rules many from itself and transforms them into self. But unity in plurality is nothing else than harmony; and from this comes order or proportion, from which proceeds beauty, and beauty awakens love. Thus it becomes evident how happiness, pleasure, love, perfection, substance, power, freedom, harmony, proportion, and beauty are bound up in one another."
From this condensed sketch, taken from Leibniz himself, the main features of his ethical doctrine clearly appear. When we were studying freedom we saw that it was not so much a starting-point of the will as its goal and ideal. We saw also that true freedom is dependent upon knowledge, upon recognition of the eternal and universal. What we have here is a statement of that doctrine in terms of feeling and of will instead of knowledge. The end of man is stated to be happiness, but the notion of happiness is developed in such a way that it is seen to be equivalent to the Aristotelian notion of self-realization; "it is development of substance, and substance is activity." It is the union of one and the many; and the one, according to the invariable doctrine of Leibniz, is the spiritual element, and the many is the real content which gives meaning to this rational unity. Happiness thus means perfection, and perfection a completely universalized individual. The motive toward the moral life is elsewhere stated to be love; and love is defined as interest in perfection, and hence culminates in love of God, the only absolute perfection. It also has its source in God, as the origin of perfection; so that Leibniz says, Whoso loves God, loves all.
Natural right, as distinguished from morals, is based upon the notion of justice, this being the outward manifestation of wisdom, or knowledge,--appreciation of the relation of actions to happiness. The definitions given by Leibniz are as follows: Just and unjust are what are useful or harmful to the public,--that is, to the community of spirits. This community includes first God, then humanity, then the state. These are so subordinated that, in cases of collision of duty, God, the universe of relations, comes before the profit of humanity, and this before the state. At another time Leibniz defines justice as social virtue, and says that there are as many kinds of "right" as there are kinds of natural communities in which happiness is an end of action. A natural community is defined as one which rests upon desire and the power of satisfying it, and includes three varieties,--domestic, civil, and ecclesiastic. "Right" is defined as that which sustains and develops any natural community. It is, in other words, the will for happiness united with insight into what makes happiness.
Corresponding to the three forms of the social organism (as we should now call the "natural community"), are the three kinds of _jus_,--_jus strictum_, equity, and piety. Each of these has its corresponding prescript. That of _jus strictum_ is to injure no one; of equity, to render to each his own; and of piety, to make the ethical law the law of conduct. _Jus strictum_ includes the right of war and peace. The right of peace exists between individuals till one breaks it. The right of war exists between men and things. The victory of person over thing is _property_. Things thus come to possess the right of the person to whom they belong as against every other person; that is, in the right of the person to himself as against the attacks of another (the right to peace) is included a right to his property. _Jus strictum_ is, of course, in all cases, enforceable by civil law and the compulsory force which accompanies it. Equity, however, reaches beyond this to obligation in cases where there is no right of compulsion. Its law is, Be of aid to all, but to each according to his merits and his claims. Finally comes piety. The other two stages are limited. The lowest is negative, it wards off harm; the second aims after happiness, but only within the limits of earthly existence. That we should ourselves bear misery, even the greatest, for the sake of others, and should subject the whole of this existence to something higher, cannot be proved excepting as we regard the society, or community, of our spirits with God. Justice with relation to God comprehends all virtues. Everything that is, is from God; and hence the law of all conduct is to use everything according to its place in the idea of God, according to its function in the universal harmony. It thus not only complements the other two kinds of justice but is the source of their inner ethical worth. "Strict justice" may conflict with equity. But God effects that what is of use to the public well-being--that is, to the universe and to humanity--shall be of use also to the individual. Thus from the standpoint of God the moral is advantageous, and the immoral hurtful. Kant's indebtedness to Leibniz will at once appear to one initiated into the philosophy of the former.
Leibniz never worked out either his ethics or his political philosophy in detail; but it is evident that they both take their origin and find their scope in the fact of man's relationship to God, that they are both, in fact, accounts of the methods of realizing a universal but not a merely formal harmony. For harmony is not, with Leibniz, an external arrangement, but is the very soul of being. Perfect harmony, or adaptation to the universe of relations, is the end of the individual, and man is informed of his progress toward this end by an inner sentiment of pleasure.
It may be added that Leibniz's æsthetic theory, so far as developed, rests upon the same basis as his ethical,--namely, upon membership in the "city of God," or community of spiritual beings. This is implied, indeed, in a passage already quoted, where he states the close connection of beauty with harmony and perfection. The feeling of beauty is the recognition in feeling of an order, proportion, and harmony which are not yet intellectually descried. Leibniz illustrates by music, the dance, and architecture. This feeling of the harmonious also becomes an impulse to produce. As perception of beauty may be regarded as unexplained, or confused, perception of truth, so creation of beauty may be considered as undeveloped will. It is action on its way to perfect freedom, for freedom is simply activity with explicit recognition of harmony.
We cannot do better than quote the conclusion of the matter from Leibniz's "Principles of Nature and of Grace," although, in part, it repeats what we have already learned. "There is something more in the rational soul, or spirit, than there is in the monad or even in the simple soul. Spirit is not only a mirror of the universe of creatures, but is also an image of the divine being. Spirit not only has a perception of the works of God, but is also capable of producing something which resembles them, though on a small scale. To say nothing of dreams, in which we invent without trouble and without volition things upon which we must reflect a long time in order to discover in our waking state,--to say nothing of this, our soul is architectonic in voluntary actions; and, in discovering the sciences in accordance with which God has regulated all things (_pondere_, _mensura_, _numero_), it imitates in its department and in its own world of activity that which God does in the macrocosm. This is the reason why spirits, entering through reason and eternal truths into a kind of society with God, are members of the city of God,--that is, of the most perfect state, formed and governed by the best of monarchs, in which there is no crime without punishment, and no good action without reward, and where there is as much of virtue and of happiness as may possibly exist. And this occurs not through a disturbance of nature, as if God's dealing with souls were in violation of mechanical laws, but by the very order of natural things, on account of the eternal, pre-established harmony between the kingdoms of nature and grace, between God as monarch and God as architect, since nature leads up to grace, and grace makes nature perfect in making use of it."
No better sentences could be found with which to conclude this analysis of Leibniz. They resound not only with the grandeur and wide scope characteristic of his thought, but they contain his essential idea, his pre-eminent "note,"--that of the harmony of the natural and the supernatural, the mechanical and the organic. The mechanical is to Leibniz what the word signifies; it is the _instrumental_, and this in the full meaning of the term. Nature is instrumental in that it performs a function, realizes a purpose, and instrumental in the sense that without it spirit, the organic, is an empty dream. The spiritual, on the other hand, is the meaning, the _idea_ of nature. It perfects it, in that it makes it instrumental to itself, and thus renders it not the passive panorama of _mere_ material force, but the manifestation of living spirit.
CHAPTER XII.
CRITICISM AND CONCLUSION.
In the exposition now completed we have in general taken for granted the truth and coherency of Leibniz's fundamental ideas, and have contented ourselves with an account of the principles and notions that flow from these ideas. The time has come for retracing our steps, and for inquiring whether the assumed premises can be thus unquestioningly adopted. This final chapter, therefore, we shall devote to criticism of the basis of Leibniz's philosophy, not attempting to test it by a comparison with other systems, but by inquiring into its internal coherency, and by a brief account of the ways in which his successors, or at least one of them, endeavored to make right the points in which he appeared to fail.
The fundamental contradiction in Leibniz is to be found, I believe, between the method which he adopted--without inquiry into its validity and scope--and the subject-matter, or perhaps better the attitude, to which he attempted to apply this method; between, that is to say, the scholastic formal logic on the one hand and the idea of inter-relation derived from the development of scientific thought, on the other. Leibniz never thought of investigating the formal logic bequeathed by scholasticism, with a view to determining its adequacy as philosophic method. He adopted, as we have seen, the principles of identity and contradiction as sole principles of the only perfect knowledge. The type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of identical propositions, whose opposite is seen to be impossible, because self-contradictory. Only knowledge in this form can be said to be demonstrative and necessary. As against Locke he justified the syllogistic method of the schoolmen as the typical method of all rational truth.
On the other hand, Leibniz, as we saw in the earlier chapters, had learned positively from the growth of science, negatively from the failures of Descartes and Spinoza, to look upon the universe as a unity of inter-related members,--as an organic unity, not a mere self-identical oneness. Failing to see the cause of the failures of Descartes and Spinoza in precisely their adoption of the logic of identity and contradiction as ultimate, he attempted to reconcile this method with the conception of organic activity. The result is constant conflict between the method and content of his philosophy, between its letter and its spirit. The contradiction is a twofold one. The unity of the content of his philosophy, the conception of organism or harmony, is a unity which essentially involves difference. The unity of his method is a formal identity which excludes it. The unity, whose discovery constitutes Leibniz's great glory as a philosopher, is a unity of activity, a dynamic process. The unity of formal logic is exclusive of any mediation or process, and is essentially rigid and lifeless. The result is that Leibniz is constantly wavering (in logical result, not of course in spirit) between two opposed errors, one of which is, in reality, not different from Spinozism, in that it regards all distinction as only phenomenal and unreal, while the other is akin to atomism, in that attempting to avoid the doctrine of the all-inclusive one, it does so only by supposing a multitude of unrelated units, termed monads. And thus the harmony, which in Leibniz's intention is the very content of reality, comes to be, in effect, an external arrangement between the one and the many, the unity and the distinction, in themselves incapable of real relations. Such were the results of Leibniz's failure, in Kantian language, to criticise his categories, in Hegelian language, to develop a logic,--the results of his assuming, without examination, the validity of formal logic as a method of truth.
So thoroughly is Leibniz imbued with the belief in its validity, that the very conception, that of sufficient reason, which should have been the means of saving him from his contradictions, is used in such a way as to plunge him deeper into them. The principle of sufficient reason may indeed be used as purely formal and external,--as equivalent to the notion that everything, no matter what, has _some_ explanation. Thus employed, it simply declares that everything has _a_ reason, without in the least determining the _what_ of that reason,--its content. This is what we mean by calling it formal. But this is not the way in which Leibniz conceives of it. According to him, it is not a principle of the external connection of one finite, or phenomenal, fact with another. It is a principle in the light of which the whole phenomenal world is to be viewed, declaring that its ground and meaning are to be found in reason, in self-conscious intelligence. As we have seen, it is equivalent, in Leibniz's case, to the notion that we have no complete nor necessary knowledge of the world of scientific fact until we have referred it to a conditioning "Supreme Spirit."
Looked at in this way, we see that the unity which Leibniz is positively employing is an organic unity, a unity of intelligence involving organic reference to the known world. But such a conception of sufficient reason leaves no place for the final validity of identity and non-contradiction; and therefore Leibniz, when dealing with his method, and not, as in the passages referred to, with his subject-matter, cannot leave the matter thus. To do so indeed would have involved a complete reconstruction of his philosophy, necessitating a derivation of all the categories employed from intelligence itself (that is, from the sufficient or conditioning reason). But the bondage to scholastic method is so great that Leibniz can see no way but to measure intelligence by the ready-made principle of identity, and thus virtually (though not in purpose) to explain away the very principle of sufficient reason. In Leibniz's words: "Contingent truths require an infinite analysis which only God can carry out. Whence by him alone are they known _a priori_ and demonstratively. For although the reason can always be found for some occurring state in a prior state, this reason again requires a reason, and we never arrive in the series to the ultimate reason. But this _progressus ad infinitum_ takes (in us) the place of a sufficient reason, which can be found only outside the series in God, on whom all its members, prior and posterior depend, rather than upon one another. _Whatever truth, therefore, is incapable of analysis, and cannot be demonstrated from its own reasons, but has its ultimate reason and certainty only from the divine mind, is not necessary._ Everything that we call truths of fact come under this head, and this is the root of their contingency."
The sentences before the one italicized repeat what we have learned before, and seem to convey the idea that the phenomenal world is that which does not account for itself, because not itself a self-determining reason, and which gets its ultimate explanation and ground in a self-sufficient reason,--God. But notice the turn given to the thought with the word "therefore." Therefore all truth incapable of analysis,--that is, of reduction to identical propositions, whose opposite is impossible because self-contradictory,--all truth whose meaning depends upon not its bare identity, but upon its relation to the very content of all intelligence, is not necessary, but contingent. Leibniz here distinctly opposes identical truths as necessary, to truth connected with reason as contingent. Synthetic reference to the very structure of intelligence is thus made, not the ground of truth, but a blot upon its completeness and necessity. Perfect truth, it is implied in the argument, is self-identical, known by mere analysis of itself, and needs no reference to an organism of reason. The reference, therefore, to a principle of sufficient reason is simply a concession to the fragmentary and imperfect condition of all knowledge. Truth in itself is self-identical; but appearing to us only confusedly, we employ the idea of sufficient reason as a makeshift, by which we refer, in a mass, all that we cannot thus reduce to identical propositions, to an intelligence, or to a _Deus ex machina_ which can so reduce it. This is the lame and impotent conclusion.
Leibniz's fundamental meaning is, no doubt, a correct one. He means that contingency of fact is not real, but apparent; that it exists only because of our inability to penetrate the reason which would enable us completely to account for the facts under consideration. He _means_ that if we could understand, _sub specie aeternitatis_, from the standpoint of universal intelligence, we should see every fact as necessary, as resulting from an intrinsic reason. But so thoroughly is he fettered by the scholastic method--that is, the method of formal logic--that he can conceive of this immanent and intrinsic reason which makes every fact a truth--that is, self-evident in its necessity--only as an analytic, self-contained identity. And herein lies his contradiction: his method obliges him to conceive of ultimate intelligence as purely formal, simply as that which does not contradict itself, while the attitude of his thought and its concrete subject-matter compel him to think of intelligence as possessing a content, as the organic unity of a system of relations.
From this contradiction flow the other contradictions of Leibniz, which we are now prepared to examine in more detail. For his ideas are so much greater than his method that in almost every point there seems to be contradiction. His ideas _per se_ mean one thing, and his ideas as interpreted by his method another. Take his doctrine of individuality, for instance. To some it has appeared that the great defect of the Leibnizian philosophy is its individualism. Such conceive him simply to have carried out in his monadism the doctrine of the individual isolated from the universe to its logical conclusions, and thereby to have rendered it absurd. In a certain sense, the charge is true. The monad, according to the oft-repeated statement, has no intercourse with the rest of the universe. It really excludes all else. It acts as if nothing but itself and God were in existence. That is to say, the monad, being the self-identical, must shut out all intrinsic or real relations with other substances. Such relations would involve a differentiating principle for which Leibniz's logic has no place. Each monad is, therefore, an isolated universe. But such a result has no value for Leibniz. He endeavors to correct it by the thought that each monad _ideally_ includes the whole universe by mirroring it. And then to reconcile the real exclusion and the ideal inclusion, he falls back on a _Deus ex machina_ who arranges a harmony between them, foreign to the intrinsic nature of each. Leibniz's individualism, it is claimed, thus makes of his philosophy a synthesis, or rather a juxtaposition, of mutually contradictory positions, each of which appears true only as long as we do not attempt to think it together with the other.
There is, no doubt, truth in this representation. But a more significant way of stating the matter is, I think, that Leibniz's defect is not in his individualism, but in the defect of his conception of the individual. His individualism is more apparent than real. It is a negative principle, and negative in the sense of _privative_. The individuality of the monad is due to its incompleteness, to its imperfections. It is really matter which makes monads mutually impenetrable or exclusive; it is matter which distinguishes them from God, and thus from one another. Without the material element they would be lost in an undistinguished identity with God, the supreme substance. But matter, it must be remembered, is passivity; and since activity is reality, or substance, matter is unsubstantial and unreal. The same results from a consideration of knowledge. Matter is always correlative to confused ideas. With the clearing up of knowledge, with making it rational, matter must disappear, so that to God, who is wholly reason, it must entirely vanish. But this view varies only in words from that of Spinoza, to whom it is the imagination, as distinguished from the intellect, that is the source of particular and finite objects.
It is perhaps in his _Theodicée_, in the treatment of the problem of evil, that his implicit Spinozism, or denial of individuality, comes out most clearly. That evil is negative, or privative, and consists in the finitude of the creature, is the result of the discussion. What is this except to assert the unreality, the merely privative character, of the finite, and to resolve all into God? To take one instance out of many: he compares inertia to the original limitation of creatures, and says that as inertia is the obstacle to the complete mobility of bodies, so privation, or lack, constitutes the essence of the imperfection, or evil, of creatures. His metaphor is of boats in the current of a river, where the heavier one goes more slowly, owing to inertia. The force of the current, which is the same to all, and which is positive, suffering no diminution, is comparable to the activity of God, which also is perfect and positive. As the current is the positive source of all the movements of the bodies, and is in no way responsible for the retardation of some boats, so God is the source only of activities,--the perfections of his creatures. "As the inertia of the boat is the cause of its slowness, so the limitations of its receptivity are the cause of the defects found in the action of creatures." Individuality is thus reduced to mere limitation; and the unlimited, the real which includes all reality, is God. We are thus placed in a double difficulty. This notion of an all-inclusive one contradicts the reality of mutually exclusive monads; and we have besides the characteristic difficulty of Spinoza,--how, on the basis of this unlimited, self-identical substance, to account for even the appearance of finitude, plurality and individuality.
Leibniz's fundamental defect may thus be said to be that, while he realized, as no one before him had done, the importance of the conception of the _negative_, he was yet unable to grasp the significance of the negative, was led to interpret it as merely privative or defective, and thus, finally, to surrender the very idea. Had not his method, his presupposition regarding analytic identity, bound him so completely in its toils, his clear perception that it was the negative element that differentiated God from the universe, intelligence from matter, might have brought him to a general anticipation not only of Kant, but of Hegel. But instead of transforming his method by this conception of negation, he allowed his assumed (_i. e._, dogmatic) method to evacuate his conception of its significance. It was Hegel who was really sufficiently in earnest with the idea to read it into the very notion of intelligence as a constituent organic element, not as a mere outward and formal limitation.
We have already referred to the saying of Leibniz that the monad acts as if nothing existed but God and itself. The same idea is sometimes expressed by saying that God alone is the immediate or direct object of the monad. Both expressions mean that, while the monad excludes all other monads, such is not the case in its relation to God, but that it has an organic relation with him. We cannot keep from asking whether there is not another aspect of the contradiction here. How is it possible for the monad so to escape from its isolation that it can have communication with God more than with other substances? Or if it can have communication with God, why cannot it equally bear real relations of community with other monads? And the answer is found in Leibniz's contradictory conceptions of God. Of these conceptions there are at least three. When Leibniz is emphasizing his monadic theory, with its aspects of individuality and exclusion, God is conceived as the highest monad, as one in the series of monads, differing from the others only in the degree of its activity. He is the "monad of monads"; the most complete, active, and individualized of all. But it is evident that in this sense there can be no more intercourse between God and a monad than there is between one monad and another. Indeed, since God is _purus actus_ without any passivity, it may be said that there is, if possible, less communication in this case than in the others. He is, as Leibniz says, what a monad without matter would be, "a deserter from the general order." He is the acme of isolation. This, of course, is the extreme development of the "individual" side of Leibniz's doctrine,