of the soul which, like the mainspring of a watch, lay coiled up tightly within it from the beginning of time. A man’s transcendental Will can then be called the source of everything that ever happens to him—his birth, his character, his whole life, and his death—all that he most detests and most emphatically does not will, like his nightmares, being an expression of the original pregnancy of his spirit, and its transcendental principle of development.
There is but one thing to add touching a point often left by these philosophers in the most hopeless obscurity. In Leibniz the number of spirits was infinite: in the later systems they are reduced to one. This difference seems greater than it is, for when such terms as Spirit or Will are used metaphorically, standing for unconscious laws of continuity or development, and when the Will or Spirit present in me now may be said to have presided over the destinies of my soul infinite ages before I was born, there seems to be no good reason why the same Spirit or Will should not preside over all the inhabitants of the universe at all times, be they gods or humming-birds. Such a Spirit or Will resembles the notion of Providence, or the law of evolution, or the pre-established harmony of Leibniz far more than it resembles a mind. Those philosophers, intent on proving that the Spirit can be only one, might
