Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/26

Rh which readers would be likely to connect the present one, — the system of Leibnitz. The scheme certainly does approach to the Leibnitian monadology more closely than to any other form of idealism that has preceded it. But while it so largely agrees with Leibnitz, it also departs from him seriously, — if indeed one can always be sure of what Leibnitz really means by his persistently metaphorical expressions.

Upon three very important counts, at any rate, the present scheme aims to avoid what seems to be the shortcoming of the monadology: —

(1) It dislodges the self-enclosed isolation of the individual, and finds a social consciousness, a tacit reference to others and a more or less developed recognition of them, to be inwrought in the very self-defining thought whereby each exists; it accordingly replaces the theory of Preëstablished Harmony by that of Spontaneous Harmony, and moreover provides for a world of efficient-causal communication between the individuals other than God — the real world of physical science — by its further development of the Kantian doctrine of Space as contrasted with the nature of Time, pushing the distinction between these two Sense-Forms to its foundations in the double aspect of self-consciousness itself, and reaching the proof, missing in Kant’s own research, that the Sense-Forms must be two, and only two.