of which maintains
its own proper being, and all of which are reciprocally determined in
their changes. Final causes dominate nature, but work through efficient
causes. Reality is not pure perfection, as in Platonism, nor the
indifferent necessity, as in Spinozism, but the system of beings
necessary to the complete progression toward the highest perfection. The
Aristotelian philosophy promises, then, to overcome both the hard
realism of Parmenides and Spinoza, and also the supernaturalism of
Plato.

[Sidenote: Leibniz's Application of the Conception of Development to the
Problem of Imperfection.]

Sect. 164. But it promises, furthermore, to remedy the defect common to
these two doctrines, the very besetting problem of this whole type of
philosophy. That problem, as has been seen, is to provide for the
imperfect within the perfect, for the temporal incidents of nature and
history within the eternal being. Many absolutist philosophers have
declared the explanation of this realm to be impossible, and have
contented themselves with calling it the realm of opinion or appearance.
And this realm of opinion or appearance has been used as a proof of the
absolute. Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides, was the first to elaborate what
have since come to be known as the paradoxes of the empirical world.
Most of these paradoxes turn upon the infinite extension and
divisibility of space and time. Zeno was especially interested in the
difficulty of conceiving motion, which involves both space and time,
and thought himself to have demonstrated its absurdity and
impossibility.[337:10] His argument is thus the complement of
Parmenides's argument for the indivisible and unchanging substance. Now
the method which Zeno here adopts may be extended to cover the whole
realm of nature and history. We should then be dialectically driven from
this realm to take refuge in absolute being. But the empirical world is
not destroyed by disparagement, and cannot long lack champions even
among the absolutists themselves. The reconciliation of nature and
history with the absolute being became the special interest of Leibniz,
the great modern Aristotelian. As a scientist and man of affairs, he
was profoundly dissatisfied with Spinoza's resolution of nature, the
human individual, and the human society into the universal being. He
became an advocate of individualism while retaining the general aim and
method of rationalism.

Like Aristotle, Leibniz attributes re