GENERAL PRINCIPLES 47 



But he elsewhere uses a simile for the pre-established 

 harmony more adequate than that of the two clocks, 

 when he compares the Monads to completely independent 

 bands of musicians playing in perfect harmony. 'In 

 short, to use an illustration, I will say that this con- 

 comitance, which I maintain, is comparable to several 

 different bands of musicians or choirs, playing their parts 

 separately, and so placed that they do not see or even 

 hear one another, which can nevertheless keep perfectly 

 together by each following their own notes, in such a way 

 that he who hears them all finds in them a harmony 

 that is wonderful and much more surprising than if there 

 had been any connexion between them. It would even 

 be possible that some "one, being beside one of two such 

 choirs, should by means of the one judge what the other 

 is doing, and should even acquire such a habit of doing 

 this (particularly if we suppose that he could hear his 

 own without seeing it, and see the other without hearing 

 it) that, with the help of his imagination, he should no 

 longer think of the choir beside which he is, but of the 

 other, or should take his own merely for an echo of the 

 other \ ' &c. The analogy must not be pressed to an 

 extreme ; but the simile is much better than that of the 

 clocks. The clocks are too much alike to represent the , 

 Monads, and the harmony of their movement is too empty 

 and almost meaningless. But in the case of the bands 

 there is a real harmony formed out of the complementary 

 movements of several self-acting units, and there is also 

 the spontaneous development from the written notes of 

 the score to the system of sounds which they signify. 

 This development from the written signs to the sounds 

 signified might be said to correspond to the passage from 

 unconscious to conscious perception in the Monad 2 . 

 An unconscious perception is, for Leibniz, a symbol of 

 the corresponding conscious perception. 



We have now considered the three chief conceptions of 

 1 Lettre a Arnauld (1687) (G. ii. 95). 2 Cf. G. ii. 74. 



