ality to individual substances,
which he calls "monads"; and like Aristotle he conceives these monads to
compose an ascending order, with God, the monad of monads, as its
dominating goal.

"Furthermore, every substance is like an entire world and like
a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole world which it
portrays, each one in its own fashion; almost as the same city
is variously represented according to the various situations
of him who is regarding it. Thus the universe is multiplied in
some sort as many times as there are substances, and the glory
of God is multiplied in the same way by as many wholly
different representations of his works."[338:11]

The very "glory of God," then, requires the innumerable finite
individuals with all their characteristic imperfections, that the
universe may lack no possible shade or quality of perspective.

[Sidenote: The Problem of Imperfection Remains Unsolved.]

Sect. 165. But the besetting problem is in fact not solved, and is one
of the chief incentives to that other philosophy of absolutism which
defines an absolute spirit or mind. Both Aristotle and Leibniz undertake
to make the perfection which determines the order of the hierarchy of
substances, at the same time the responsible author of the whole
hierarchy. In this case the dilemma is plain. If the divine form or the
divine monad be other than the stages that lead up to it, these latter
cannot be essential to it, for God is by definition absolutely
self-sufficient. If, on the other hand, God is identical with the
development in its entirety, then two quite incommensurable standards of
perfection determine the supremacy of the divine nature, that of the
whole and that of the highest parts of the whole. The union of these two
and the definition of a perfection which may be at once the development
and its goal, is the task of absolute idealism.

[Sidenote: Absolute Realism in Epistemology. Rationalism.]

Sect. 166. Of the two fundamental questions of epistemology, absolute
realism answers the one explicitly, the other implicitly. As respects
_the source of the most valid knowledge_, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle,
Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is the work of reason, of pure
intellection. Plato is the great exponent of dialectic, or the
reciprocal affinities and necessities of ideas. Aristotle is the founder
of deductive logic. Spinoza proposes to consider even "human actions