Chap. XII. ] PliUosophy of the Human Mind. 1 8? 



annihilation cf any being which it has created. 

 Finally, he maintained that monads of a lower 

 order may, by a regular evolution of their powers, 

 rise to a higher order; that they may be succes- 

 sively joined to organised bodies of various forms, 

 and different degrees of perception ; but that they 

 can never die, or cease to be, in some degree, 

 active and percipient. 



This philosopher distinguished between percep- 

 tion and apperception. The former he supposed 

 common to all monads. The latter, implying con- 

 sciousness, reflection, and a capacity to compre- 

 hend abstract truths, he believed to be peculiar to 

 the hi "'her orders, such as the soul of man. He 

 conceived that our bodies and minds are united in 

 such a manner, that neither has any physical in- 

 fluence on the other, each performing all its ope- 

 rations by its own internal powers ; yet the opera- 

 tions of one corresponding exactly with those of 

 the other, by a precstablished harmony. Ac- 

 co.rding to this system, all our perceptions of ex- 

 ternal objects would be the same, though those ob- 

 jects had never existed, or though they should, by 

 divine power, be annihilated. We do not per- 

 ceive external things because they exist, but be- 

 cause the soul was originally so constituted as to 

 produce in itself all its successive changes and per- 

 ceptions independently of external objects. Every 

 ' operation of the soul is the necessary consequence 

 of that state of it which preceded the operation ; 

 and that state the neces^sary consequence of the 

 state immediately preceding it, and so backwards, 

 till we come to its first constitution, which pro- 

 duces successively, and by necessary consequence, 



