the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation, identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,--but a point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirely _carens recordatione,_ or oblivious of its essential totality. But if the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its side of passivity, but passivity here does not mean _mere_ passivity, but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar stand-point--a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling this apparent contradiction--how far even any one can reveal the mystic indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality, and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the phrase _inclinat, non necessitat_[9], to emphasise the immanence of law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza, in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the difference between _natura naturans_ and _natura naturata._ Yet the Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, or _merely_ transcendent God.