scattered interferences from without, and all becoming transformed into a series of disconnected miracles.  An order of nature such as would be destroyed by God’s action does not exist; God brings everything to pass; even the passage of motion from one body to another is his work.  Further, Geulincx expressly says that God has imposed such laws on motion that it harmonizes with the soul’s free volition, of which, however, it is entirely independent (similar statements occur also in De la Forge).  And with this our thinker appears—­as Pfleiderer[1] emphasizes—­closely to approach the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz.  The occasionalistic theory certainly constitutes the preliminary step to the Leibnitzian; but an essential difference separates the two.  The advance does not consist in the substitution by Leibnitz of one single miracle at creation for a number of isolated and continually recurring ones, but (as Leibnitz himself remarks, in reply to the objection expressed by Father Lami, that a perpetual miracle is no miracle) in the exchange of the immediate causality of God for natural causation.  With Geulincx mind and body act on each other, but not by their own power; with Leibnitz the monads do not act on one another, but they act by their own power.[2]—­When Geulincx in the same connection advances to the statements that, in view of the limitedness and passivity of finite things, God is the only truly active, because the only independent, being in the world, that all activity is his activity, that the human (finite) spirit is related to the divine (infinite) spirit as the individual body to space in general, viz., as a section of it, so that, by thinking away all limitations from our mind, we find God in us and ourselves in him, it shows how nearly he verges on pantheism.

[Footnote 1:  Edm.  Pfleiderer, Geulincx, als Hauptvertreter der occasionalistischen Metaphysik und Ethik, Tuebingen, 1882; the same, Leibniz und Geulincx mit besonderer Beziehung auf ihr Uhrengleichnis, Tuebingen, 1884.]

[Footnote 2:  See Ed. Zeller, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1884, p. 673 seq.; Eucken, Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xix., 1893, p. 525 seq; vol. xxiii., 1887, p. 587 seq.]

Geulincx’s services to noetics have been duly recognized by Ed. Grimm (Jena, 1875), although with an excessive approximation to Kant.  In this field he advances many acute and suggestive thoughts, as the deduction which reappears in Lotze, that the actually existent world of figure and motion cognized by thought, though the real world, is poorer than the wonderful world of motley sensuous appearance conjured forth in our minds on the occasion of the former, that the latter is the more beautiful and more worthy of a divine author.  Further, the conviction, also held by Lotze, that the fundamental activities of the mind cannot be defined, but only known through inner experience