of sound, express the same thing. So of quality and quantity, of soul
and body. It is for having cut all connection between the two terms that
philosophers have been led to establish between them a rigorous
parallelism, of which the ancients had not dreamed, to regard them as
translations and not as inversions of each other; in short, to posit a
fundamental identity as a substratum to their duality. The synthesis to
which they rose thus became capable of embracing everything. A divine
mechanism made the phenomena of thought to correspond to those of
extension, each to each, qualities to quantities, souls to bodies.
It is this parallelism that we find both in Leibniz and in Spinoza--in
different forms, it is true, because of the unequal importance which
they attach to extension. With Spinoza, the two terms Thought and
Extension are placed, in principle at least, in the same rank. They are,
therefore, two translations of one and the same original, or, as Spinoza
says, two attributes of one and the same substance, which we must call
God. And these two translations, as also an infinity of others into
languages which we know not, are called up and even forced into
existence by the original, just as the essence of the circle is
translated automatically, so to speak, both by a figure and by an
equation. For Leibniz, on the contrary, extension is indeed still a
translation, but it is thought that is the original, and thought might
dispense with translation, the translation being made only for us. In
positing God, we necessarily posit also all the possible views of God,
that is to say, the monads. But we can always imagine that a view has
been taken from a point of view, and it is natural for an imperfect mind
like ours to class views, qualitatively different, according to the
order and position of points of view, qualitatively identical, from
which the views might have been taken. In reality the points of view do
not exist, for there are only views, each given in an indivisible block
and representing in its own way the whole of reality, which is God. But
we need to express the plurality of the views, that are _unlike_ each
other, by the multiplicity of the points of view that are _exterior_ to
each other; and we also need to symbolize the more or less close
relationship between the views by the relative situation of the points
of view to one another, their nearness or their distance, that is to
say, by a magnitude. That is what Leibniz means when he says that space
is the order of coexistents, that the perception of extension is a
confused perception (that is to say, a perception relative to an
imperfect mind), and that nothing exists but monads, expressing thereby
that the real Whole has no parts, but is repeated to infinity, each time
integrally (though diversely) within itself, and that all these
repetitions are complementary to each other. In just the same way, the
visible relief of an object is equivalent to the whole set of
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