fact of evolution, which Leibnitz appears to have been aiming at in his doctrines of “gradation” and “aggrandisement,” by its view of the progressive character of the sense-world as a phase in the being of minds attracted by a divine Ideal.
These relations to Leibnitz, particularly when set in connexion with the higher rating of individuality and of final cause that characterises the theory now offered, suggest its close relationship with Aristotle, or even its direct derivation from him. Indeed, were it not for the profound ambiguity that marks Aristotle’s thought, its cloudy vacillation between pluralism and monism, one might well find in his repeated insistence on the dominantly individual character of Substance and on the distinctness of God from the entire world of sense and passivity, joined with his emphasis on final causation, the complete anticipation of the central features of the present view. But, taken on the whole, the main drift of Aristotle seems unmistakably to monism after all, and his frequent elevation of final cause, en passant, to the apparently foremost place, is at last cancelled in the asserted efficient causality of God as the Prime Mover. Aristotle’s “real world,” combining ideal form with real matter, appears to be enclosed by him in the all-determining single-conscious compass of his Divine θεωρία, which he makes the synthetic “Entelechy” that unites in its action efficient and final causation
