Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/27

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(2) It thus parts company with that “gradation among the monads” which, as Leibnitz manages it, — with his conception of “body” as an assemblage of monads subject to a higher “regnant” monad, and of “God” as the Monad of monads, the Supreme Regnant under whom all these bodies arc formed into a “System of Nature,” — amounts to a system of caste in the world of real individuals, annulling universal freedom, and therefore abrogating the asserted “System of Grace,” by leaving to but one individual any being but process, and that a process directed exclusively by the so-called God, of whom all the other monads are but so many “fulgurations.”

(3) It equally leaves aside that illusory character of extension and duration which Leibnitz so bluntly affirms, when he proposes to account for the apparent extending and lasting of sensible things by saying that these qualities are owing merely to “confusion and obscurity of thought”: with thought distinct and clear, he holds, the real is seen as the monad, the bare “metaphysical point.” The theory offered in these essays, on the contrary, gives to natural objects, as items in the real experience of minds, a reality, secondary and derivative indeed, but still unquestionable, and associated essentially with the self-defining activity of every mind other than God, while it provides for the great and signal