32 INTRODUCTION 



angle at which Leibniz regards his problem prevents him-, 

 from developing this. His early imaginative liking for 

 'atoms and the void,' when first he 'freed himself from 

 the yoke of Aristotle 1 ,' the love of historical system and 

 of well-grounded hypothesis which set his whole intel- 

 lectual character in revolt against Spinoza's abstract unity 

 and his purely a priori deductions, probably also the 

 influence of his Scholastic training with its suggestions 

 of an infinite multiplicity of 'substantial forms' all 

 resulted in a tendency to emphasize rather the elements 

 of reality than its wholeness. That there can be no real 

 whole without real units, is Leibniz's guiding thought 2 , 

 and accordingly his question does not primarily take the 

 form : ' What must be the nature of a whole which 

 expresses itself in each of its parts ? ' It rather is : 

 ' What must be the nature of a part or unit which can in 

 some way contain or express the whole within itself ? ' 



Now the part cannot contain the whole within itself 

 actually and fully, in all its realized completeness ; for 

 thus the distinction between whole and part would 

 vanish. The part must, therefore, contain the whole 

 potentially and ideally or by means of representation. 



The relation of whole and parts is not to be conceived 

 as one of greater and less, of thing containing and things 



But the notion of organism, as .he uses it, is much more vague than 

 it has since become. According to Leibniz anything is an organism 

 if it has a ' soul ' or principle of unity, that is to say, if it is other 

 than a mere aggregate of independent elements. 



1 New System, 3. 



2 Cf. Lettre a Arnauld (1687) (G. ii. 97) : < Every machine pre- 

 supposes some substance in the pieces from which it is made, and 

 there is no manifold without real units. In short, I take as 

 axiomatic this identical proposition, in which the difference is 

 entirely a matter of accent, namely, that what is not really one 

 On] being is^not really a [un~\ being. It has always been thought 

 that unity [run] and being are reciprocal things. " Being" is one 

 thing, beings" is another; but the plural presupposes the 

 singular, and where there is not one being there will still less be 

 several, beings.' Being and unity are convertible terms [ens et 

 unum convertuntur]: Epist. ad des Bosses (1706) (E. 435 b ; G. ii. 304). 

 The phrase is used by Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia (1440), ii. 7. 



