Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/727

. 6.] to a finite being. We have now to inquire more particularly into the nature of those real unities, and to consider their relations to one another, to the universe, and to God.

What did Leibnitz mean by an “individual substance” or monad? The current view is that, in opposition to the Cartesian school, he was seeking to show that the world consists of a number of separate and distinct substances, since corporeal phenomena imply the existence of forces in nature, and every active being is necessarily individual (330). To disprove this interpretation, it is enough to say that for Leibnitz God is an active substance, and yet He cannot be called a separate individual (333). By individual substance he means the completely specified subject (334). No doubt such a substance must also be distinct from all others, but its essence does not lie in this distinction, but in the fact that it contains within itself all the predicates by which it is specified as individual (335). Leibnitz was not protesting against the denial by Spinoza of all separate individuality to finite substances, but against the Scholastic substantiation of merely general predicates (339).

As monads express their whole past and future, so they express the whole universe. For the world is not a number of separate systems, but one connected whole, in which any change in one part involves a change in all. Moreover (and this is the main point) our ideas are not produced by independent things-in-themselves. If they were, some substances would naturally act upon us, some would not. Since, however, we represent things themselves, which are all connected in a system, we must represent the whole world, and not merely a part of it (343–4). But, though all monads express the whole world, they do so only from their own point of view; they are the special aspects of the one organic system, and naturally the world is mirrored in the most various ways (347).

From what has been said the true view of the “pre-established harmony” of monads will be understood. The ordinary account is that while the Cartesians explain the harmony of substances by the direct interference of God, Leibnitz maintains that they harmonize because they were originally brought into harmony by God. Dillmann contends that this is a thoroughly distorted account of Leibnitz’s doctrine. It conceives of monads in a purely mechanical way, instead of regarding them as self-active beings. The truth is that no deus ex machina is needed to explain the harmony of monads, for their essential nature is to harmonize. The monad contains in itself a representation of the whole world, and the process of development