them is, therefore, the result of contingency or free will.
Leibniz did not actually find a means of getting around this problem that was convincingly consistent with his system, except insofar as his distinction regarding the multiplicity of substances did so. But it certainly represented an 'advance' over Spinoza in whose Ethics (1675) the pantheistic argument was that there was but one substance, and that substance was God, which left no room for contingency or free will. In Spinoza's view the impression of contingency was merely created by the inadequacy of the human mind to grasp the completeness of creation. Since "we can have but a very inadequate knowledge" of our own minds and bodies, let alone of other things, even the fact that "each individual thing must be determined to existence and action by another individual thing in certain and determinate manner . . . and so on ad infinitum" we can only know that all things are subject to corruption and this is the only contingency (560). It is a contingency, however, simply because we are incapable of knowing it. The mind is "a certain and determinate mode of thought and cannot be the free cause of its own actions, or have an absolute faculty of willin
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