islead
one,--that in it the continuity of events, alike in the material and the
psychical world, is interrupted by frequent scattered interferences from
without, and all becoming transformed into a series of disconnected
miracles. An order of nature such as would be destroyed by God's action
does not exist; God brings everything to pass; even the passage of motion
from one body to another is his work. Further, Geulincx expressly says that
God has imposed such _laws_ on motion that it harmonizes with the soul's
free volition, of which, however, it is entirely independent (similar
statements occur also in De la Forge). And with this our thinker
appears--as Pfleiderer[1] emphasizes--closely to approach the
pre-established harmony of Leibnitz. The occasionalistic theory certainly
constitutes the preliminary step to the Leibnitzian; but an essential
difference separates the two. The advance does not consist in the
substitution by Leibnitz of one single miracle at creation for a number of
isolated and continually recurring ones, but (as Leibnitz himself remarks,
in reply to the objection expressed by Father Lami, that a perpetual
miracle is no miracle) in the exchange of the immediate causality of God
for natural causation. With Geulincx mind and body act on each other, but
not by their own power; with Leibnitz the monads do not act on one another,
but they act by their own power.[2]--When Geulincx in the same connection
advances to the statements that, in view of the limitedness and passivity
of finite things, God is the only truly active, because the only
independent, being in the world, that all activity is his activity, that
the human (finite) spirit is related to the divine (infinite) spirit as
the individual body to space in general, viz., as a section of it, so that,
by thinking away all limitations from our mind, we find God in us and
ourselves in him, it shows how nearly he verges on pantheism.

[Footnote 1: Edm. Pfleiderer, _Geulincx, als Hauptvertreter der
occasionalistischen Metaphysik und Ethik_, Tuebingen, 1882; the same,
_Leibniz und Geulincx mit besonderer Beziehung auf ihr Uhrengleichnis_,
Tuebingen, 1884.]

[Footnote 2: See Ed. Zeller, _Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der
Wissenschaften_, 1884, p. 673 _seq_.; Eucken, _Philosophische Monatshefte_,
vol. xix., 1893, p. 525 _seq_; vol. xxiii., 1887, p. 587 _seq_.]

Geulincx's services to noetics have been duly recognized by Ed. Grimm
(Jena, 1875), altho