makes itself divine; and approaching perfection, by the same progress it
also approaches immortality. It is conceivable that by error and sin it
kills itself, and by virtue renders itself imperishable. This immortality
is not or does not seem to be personal, it is literally a definite re-entry
into the bosom of God; Spinozian immortality would therefore be a
prolongation of the same effort which we make in this life to adhere to
universal order; the recompense for having adhered to it here below is to
be absorbed in it there, and in that lies true beatitude. Here below we
ought to see everything from the point of view of eternity (_sub specie
aeternitatis_), and this is a way of being eternal; elsewhere we shall
be in eternity itself.

LEIBNITZ.--Leibnitz possessed a universal mind, being historian,
naturalist, politician, diplomatist, scholar, theologian, mathematician;
here we will regard him only as philosopher. For Leibnitz the basis, the
substance of all beings is not either thought or extension as with
Descartes, but is force, productive of action. "What does not act does not
exist." Everything that exists is a force, either action or tendency to
action. And force, all force has two characteristics: it desires to do, it
wishes to think. The world is the graduated compound of all these
forces. Above all there is the supreme force, God, who is infinite force,
infinite thought; by successive descents those base and obscure forces are
reached which seem to have neither power nor thought, and yet have a
minimum of power and even of thought, so to speak, latent. God thinks and
acts infinitely; man thinks and acts powerfully, thanks to reason, which
distinguishes him from the rest of creation; the animal acts and thinks
dimly, but it does act and think, for it has a soul composed of memory and
of the results and consequences of memory, and by parenthesis
"three-fourths of our own actions are governed by memory, and most
frequently we act like animals"; plants act, and if they do not think, at