e world. He was, therefore, transcendent to the
world, and the duration of things was juxtaposed to His eternity, of
which it was only a weakening. But in the principle to which we are led
by the consideration of universal mechanism, and which must serve as its
substratum, it is not concepts or _things_, but laws or _relations_ that
are condensed. Now, a relation does not exist separately. A law connects
changing terms and is immanent in what it governs. The principle in
which all these relations are ultimately summed up, and which is the
basis of the unity of nature, cannot, therefore, be transcendent to
sensible reality; it is immanent in it, and we must suppose that it is
at once both in and out of time, gathered up in the unity of its
substance and yet condemned to wind it off in an endless chain. Rather
than formulate so appalling a contradiction, the philosophers were
necessarily led to sacrifice the weaker of the two terms, and to regard
the temporal aspect of things as a mere illusion. Leibniz says so in
explicit terms, for he makes of time, as of space, a confused
perception. While the multiplicity of his monads expresses only the
diversity of views taken of the whole, the history of an isolated monad
seems to be hardly anything else than the manifold views that it can
take of its own substance: so that time would consist in all the points
of view that each monad can assume towards itself, as space consists in
all the points of view that all monads can assume towards God. But the
thought of Spinoza is much less clear, and this philosopher seems to
have sought to establish, between eternity and that which has duration,
the same difference as Aristotle made between essence and accidents: a
most difficult undertaking, for the [Greek: yle] of Aristotle was no
longer there to measure the distance and explain the passage from the
essential to the accidental, Descartes having eliminated it for ever.
However that may be, the deeper we go into the Spinozistic conception of
the "inadequate," as related to the "adequate," the more we feel
ourselves moving in the direction of Aristotelianism--just as the
Leibnizian monads, in proportion as they mark themselves out the more
clearly, tend to approximate to the Intelligibles of Plotinus.[109] The
natural trend of these two philosophies brings them back to the
conclusions of the ancient philosophy.

To sum up, the resemblances of this new metaphysic to that of the
ancients ari