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688 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mechanical work, and arrived at the conclusion that even for purely scientific
purposes it is desirable to look upon force, not as a primary quantity, but as a
quantity derived from some other value.
But, luckily for truth
Leibnitz was a philosopher;
and as such he had certain primary principles, which
biassed him in favour of certain conclusions, and his discovery that external things
were substances endowed with force was at once used for the purpose of applying
these principles. One of these principles was the law of continuity, the conviction
that all the world was connected, that there were no gaps and chasms which could
not be bridged over. The contrast of extended thinking substances was unbearable
to him. The definition of the extended substances had already become untenable:
it was natural that a similar enquiry was made into the definition of mind, the
thinking substance.
The divisions made by L,eibnitz, however incomplete and faulty from
the standpoint of Occultism, show a spirit of metaphysical intuition to
which no man of Science, not Descartes, not even Kant, has ever
reached. With him there existed ever an infinite gradation of thought.
Only a small portion of the contents of our thoughts, he said, rises into
the clearness of apperception, "into the light of perfect consciousness."
Many remain in a confused or obscure state, in the state of "perceptions";
but they are there. Descartes denied soul to the animal,
Leibnitz, as do the Occultists, endowed "the whole creation with
mental life, this being, according to him, capable of infinite gradations."
And this, as Mertz justly observes:
At once widened the realm of mental life, destroying the contrast of animate and
inanimate matter; it did yet more—it reacted on the conception of matter, of the
extended substance. For it became evident that external or material things presented
the property of extension to our senses only, not to our thinking faculties.
The mathematician, in order to calculate geometrical figures, had been obliged to
divide them into an infinite number of infinitely small parts, and the physicist saw
no limit to the divisibility of matter into atoms. The bulk through which external
things seemed to fill space was a property which they acquired only through the
coarseness of our senses. . . . Leibnitz followed these arguments to some extent,
but he could not rest content in assuming that matter was composed of a
finite number of very small parts. His mathematical mind forced him to carry out
the argument in infinitum. And what became of the atoms then. They lost their
extension and they retained only their property of resistance;
they were the centres
of force. They were reduced to mathematical points. . . . But if their extension
in space was nothing, so much fuller was their inner life. Assuming that inner
existence, such as that of the human mind, is a new dimension, not a geometrical
but a metaphysical dimension, . . . having reduced the geometrical extension
of the atoms to nothing, Leibnitz endowed them with an infinite extension in the