impregnated with the Idea, is less
corporeal than our "body." The scission was not yet irremediable between
the two terms. It has become so, and thence a metaphysic that aims at an
abstract unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthesis
only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the absolute
heterogeneity of the two halves in order to consider 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 between them. But if they belong to two
different languages, they might, just because of their radical diversity
of sound, express the same thing. 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 everything. A divine
mechanism made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of
extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, souls to bodies.

It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in Spinoza--in
different forms, it is true, because of the unequal 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 are,
therefore, 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, as also an infinity 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 automatically, 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 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, according to the