The sentences before the one italicized repeat what we have learned before, and seem to convey the idea that the phenomenal world is that which does not account for itself, because not itself a self-determining reason, and which gets its ultimate explanation and ground in a self-sufficient reason,--God. But notice the turn given to the thought with the word "therefore." Therefore all truth incapable of analysis,--that is, of reduction to identical propositions, whose opposite is impossible because self-contradictory,--all truth whose meaning depends upon not its bare identity, but upon its relation to the very content of all intelligence, is not necessary, but contingent. Leibniz here distinctly opposes identical truths as necessary, to truth connected with reason as contingent. Synthetic reference to the very structure of intelligence is thus made, not the ground of truth, but a blot upon its completeness and necessity. Perfect truth, it is implied in the argument, is self-identical, known by mere analysis of itself, and needs no reference to an organism of reason. The reference, therefore, to a principle of sufficient reason is simply a concession to the fragmentary and imperfect condition of all knowledge. Truth in itself is self-identical; but appearing to us only confusedly, we employ the idea of sufficient reason as a makeshift, by which we refer, in a mass, all that we cannot thus reduce to identical propositions, to an intelligence, or to a _Deus ex machina_ which can so reduce it. This is the lame and impotent conclusion. Leibniz's fundamental meaning is, no doubt, a correct one. He means that contingency of fact is not real, but apparent; that it exists only because of our inability to penetrate the reason which would enable us completely to account for the facts under consideration. He _means_ that if we could understand, _sub specie aeternitatis_, from the standpoint of universal intelligence, we should see every fact as necessary, as resulting from an intrinsic reason. But so thoroughly is he fettered by the scholastic method--that is, the method of formal logic--that he can conceive of this immanent and intrinsic reason which makes every fact a truth--that is, self-evident in its necessity--only as an analytic, self-contained identity. And herein lies his contradiction: his method obliges him to conceive of ultimate intelligence as purely formal, simply as that which does not contradict itself, while the attitude of his thought and its concrete subject-matter compel him to think of intelligence as possessing a content, as the organic unity of a system of relations.