Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/368

354 the true consequence of his own principles, viz., that self-consciousness, as the more concrete principle, is necessarily implied or presupposed in the continuity of the conscious and the unconscious, that it is the system in which they are elements. Such a conclusion would, of course, have destroyed the monadology by making the universe a single all-comprehensive Monad. Accordingly Leibniz at this point falls back upon the method of Descartes and Spinoza, practically (though not avowedly) treating the self-conscious soul as discontinuous with the conscious and the unconscious, as having some new quality that is a sheer addition to the qualities of these lower souls.

(3) This beginning of a rift in continuity widens into an open self-contradiction when we come to Leibniz's account of God, the highest in the scale of being. The contradiction consists in regarding God as at once the highest Monad and the being in whose understanding the essences of all possible systems are and who by His choice makes the best possible system real. God is thus both within and without the system of monads. In so far as He is merely an element in the system, He is less than God: in so far as He is outside of the system, the continuity is broken. Leibniz's own suggestion regarding the proof of the existence of God would, if thought out, have revealed the contradiction. He says that the Cartesian ontological proof of the existence of God is incomplete. It ought, he says, to run: if the most perfect Being is possible (i.e., if the idea of a most perfect Being is not self-contradictory), it follows that the most perfect Being exists. And he argues that, for instance, there is no swiftest possible motion, because the idea of it can be shown to be self-contradictory. But Leibniz failed to observe that, if the most perfect Being is regarded as one of a series, the idea of it is self-contradictory. For either it contains all the perfections (i.e. in Leibniz's sense, the positive reality) of the other members of the series or it does not. If it does, it is no longer to be regarded as one member of the series; if it does not, it is no longer most perfect, for ex hypothesi it lacks some perfections. Leibniz misses the contradiction by arguing that the idea of a most perfect Being is not self-contradictory, for all perfections are mutually compatible. This argument, however, was made by him long before he had thought out his monadology, and he tells us that in one of the interviews at the Hague he submitted it to Spinoza