Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/69

 of it. When, however, he wanted to determine more closely the essence of these things existing objectively in themselves, he found himself obliged to declare the Objects in themselves to be Subjects (monades), and by doing so he furnished the most striking proof of the inability of our consciousness, in as far as it is merely cognitive, to find within the limits of the intellect—i.e. of the apparatus by means of which we represent the world—anything beyond Subject and Object; the representer and the represented. Therefore, if we abstract from the objectivity of an Object, or in other words, from its being represented (Vorgestelltwerden), if we annul it in its quality as an Object, yet still wish to retain something, we can meet with nothing but the Subject. Conversely, if we desire to abstract from the subjectivity of the Subject, yet to have something over, the contrary takes place, and this leads to Materialism.

Spinoza, who never thoroughly sifted the matter, and never therefore acquired a clear notion of it, nevertheless quite understood the necessary correlation between Subject and Object as so essential, that they are inconceivable without it; consequently he defined it as an identity in the Substance (which alone exists) of that which knows, with that which has extension.

§ 20. Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming.
In the Class of Objects for the Subject just described, the principle of sufficient reason figures as the Law of Causality, and, as such, I call it the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming, principium rationis sufficients fiendi. By it,