be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might indeed be well to add a third principle--what Leibniz has sometimes called the Law of Continuity--the law that, as he says, distinct and noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this: continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past to future, is the process of a Mind. _Omne Corpus_, wrote Leibniz in 1671, _est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione._ Every physical and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which neither looks before nor after, but is limited _for itself_ to the mere instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent observer it has a past,--it has a memory, it bears in it the traces of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the 'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time. But the teaching of Leibniz--even more perhaps than that of Spinoza--fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend his theories to all men,--and not least perhaps to win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligent women--he was led to present them under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.