CH. RENOUVIER ANI> L. PRAT, La Nouvelle Monadologie. 105) in the most obvious manner, which leads to no valuable results or convenient methods, and into which no ingenuity of the greatest intellects has been able to introduce the least element of novelty and progress. For from the earliest days when the Eleatics of the West and the Brahmins of the East first enunciated it, the dreary doctrine that ' it is all one ' has maintained its unity in the diversity of its manifestations and admirably illustrated the dictum plus 50 change plus c'est la meme chose. Monism has exercised over men's minds a fascination the more remarkable by reason of the ease with which its difficulties could be apprehended, and obviated by the rival hypothesis of pluralism. If all things are one, then there is nothing but the nature of the One itself to account for all that all things are, and if these do not please us, it is hopeless to protest or complain or reform. All distinctions are really indifferent to and incapable of reaching the immutable and ineluctable unity of the world's essence, and this common doom overtakes also the distinctions of good and evil, right and wrong, pleasant and painful, which form the practical necessities impelling us to reflexion and forcing us to re-think our experience. The ambiguous dictum ' it is all one ' is thus necessarily the Alpha and Omega of Monism in practice as well as in theory. Pluralism on the other hand leaves at least some specious ground for the thought of a real struggle, for the hope of a real victory, whereby the experience of finite beings may be ' remoulded nearer to the heart's desire '. And yet the possibilities of this solution have never really been fully explored and systematically discussed ; the terrors of monistic tradition have nearly always driven back even the boldest from the tabooed territory, and kept the crowd in the sterile paths strewn with the dry bones of dead philosophies, which at best conduct to the extinction and absorption of all things in the cold clutches of an inhuman unity of the uni- verse. The truth of these remarks is most instructively exemplified by the fate of Leibniz. Leibniz, who had every qualification for philosophic greatness except courage, had marked hankerings after pluralism. At his magic touch atomism blossomed into monadism, and monadism has ever since remained the only philosophically respectable form of pluralism. But Leibniz him- self had not the courage to enter the promised land, and to dispel the bogies which were supposed to haunt it. By profession a courtier and by temperament a conciliator, who if he had happened to be born a Parsee would doubtless have devoted his life to the reconciliation of Ormuzd and Ahriman, he only erected a monu- ment which faced both ways. His monadology is still the great landmark on the road to pluralism, but the true pluralist must resolutely pass beyond it and disregard the palimpsest inscriptions graven upon it, which would only conduct him back to the monism from which he seeks to escape. The infinity of God and the world, the absolute determination of every event, the infinite
