'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two individual things could never be perfectly alike, and that they ought always to differ more than _numero._ And with this we have done once for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought, a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose, entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,... and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable, unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:--whereas an abstraction is not an error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.' This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz had presented under many names and with many applications, as the olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not of _mere_ so-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest that life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition: and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set in its place--from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull. This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial, and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic--but not auto-analysis or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it 'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner