unexampled clearness on matters the most abstruse, but never, that we are aware, in all the variety of his communications, extending over so many years, contradicted himself. No philosopher is more intelligible, none more consequent.

In philosophy Leibniz was a Realist. We use that term in the modern, not in the scholastic, sense. In the scholastic sense, as we have seen, he was not a Realist, but from childhood up, a Nominalist. But the Realism of the schools has less affinity with the Realism than with the Idealism of the present day.

His opinions must be studied in connection with those of his contemporaries.

Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz, the four most distinguished philosophers of the seventeenth century, represent four widely different and cardinal tendencies in philosophy, Dualism, Idealism, Sensualism, and Realism.

Descartes perceived the incompatibility of the two primary qualities of being, thought and extension, as attributes of one and the same (created) substance. He therefore postulated two (created) substances, one characterized by thought without extension, the other by extension without thought. These two are so alien and so incon

1 We regret the necessity of using a word which is oftener used in a bad sense very different from the one here intended.

gruous that neither can influence the other, or determine the other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation of Deity (the doctrine of Occasional Causes). This is Dualism, - that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter which Descartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into philosophic significance, and which ever since has been the prevailing ontology of the Western world. So deeply has the thought of that master mind inwrought itself into the very consciousness of humanity!

Spinoza saw that if God alone can bring mind and matter together and effect a relation between them, it follows that mind and matter, or their attributes, however contrary, do meet in Deity; and if so, what need of three distinct natures? What need of two substances besides God, as subjects of these attributes? Retain the middle term and drop the extremes, and you have the Spinozan doctrine of one (uncreated) substance, combining the attributes of thought and extension. This is Pantheism, or objective idealism, as distinguished from the subjective idealism of Fichte. Strange that the stigma of atheism should have been affixed to a system whose very starting-point is Deity, and whose great characteristic is the ignoration of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and devout Novalis pronounced the author a God

drunken man, and Spinozism a surfeit of Deity. 1 Naturally enough, the charge of atheism comes from the unbelieving Bayle, whose omnivorous mind, like the anaconda, assisted its enormous deglutition with a poisonous saliva of its own, and whose negative temper makes the "Dictionnaire Historique" more Morgue than Valhalla.

Locke, who combined in a strange union strong religious faith with philosophic unbelief, turned aside, as we have seen, from the questions which had occupied his predecessors; knew little and cared less about substance and accident, matter and spirit; but set himself to investigate the nature of the organ itself by which truth is apprehended. In this investigation he began by emptying the mind of all native elements of knowledge. repudiated any supposed dower of original truths or innate or connate ideas, and endeavored to show how, by acting on the report of the senses and personal experience, the understanding arrives at all the ideas of which it is conscious. The mode of procedure in this case is empiricism; the result with Locke was sensualism,- more fully developed by Condillac in the next century. But the same

He

Let us not be misunderstood. Pantheism is not Theism, and the one substance of Spinoza is very unlike the one God of theology; but neither is the doctrine Atheism in any legitimate

sense.

2 Essai sur l'Origine des Connaissances humaines.

method may lead, as in the case of Berkeley, to immaterialism, falsely called idealism. Or it may lead, as in the case of Helvetius, to materialism. Locke himself would probably have landed in materialism, had he followed freely the bent of his own thought, without the restraints of a cautious temper, and respect for the common and traditional opinion of his time. The "Essay" discovers an unmistakable leaning in that direction; as where the author supposes,

"We shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no ; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter fitly disposed a power to perceive and think; . . . it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking, since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator. For I see no contradiction in it, that the first thinking eternal Being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of created, senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought."1

With such notions of the nature of thought, as 1 Book iv. chap. 3, sect. 6.

a kind of mechanical contrivance that can be conferred outright by an arbitrary act of Deity, and attached to one nature as well as another, it is evident that Locke could have had no idea of spirit as conceived by metaphysicians, or no belief in that idea, if conceived. And with such conceptions of Deity and Divine operations, as consisting in absolute power dissociated from absolute reason, one would not be surprised to find him asserting that God, if he pleased, might make two and two to be one, instead of four; that mathematical laws are arbitrary determinations of the Supreme Will; that a thing is true only as God wills it to be so, in fine, that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The resort to "Omnipotency in such matters is more convenient than philosophical; it is a dodging of the question, instead of an attempt to solve it. Divine ordination - Διὸς δ' ετελείετο βουλή is a maxim which settles all difficulties; but it also precludes all inquiry. Why speculate at all, with this universal solvent at hand?

The "contradiction" which Locke could not see was clearly seen and keenly felt by Leibniz. The arbitrary will of God, to him, was no solution. He believed in necessary truths independent of the Supreme Will; in other words, he believed that the Supreme Will is but the organ of the Supreme