STATEMENT OF LEIBNIZ S PHILOSOPHY 1OI 



by our senses or imagination (which perceive things 

 confusedly) they are mere connected or orderly pheno- 

 mena, abstractions or incomplete things, which pre- 

 suppose souls or Monads. 



Space and Time. 



In one of the Letters to Arnauld\ Leibniz speaks of 

 space and time as phenomena bene fundata. Probably, 

 however, he did not intend this statement to be very 

 rigidly interpreted, and there is much value in the view 

 of Erdmann that space and time are to be regarded as 

 purely ideal, entia mentalia 2 , while extended bodies and 

 actual events in time are entia semimentalia 3 or phenomena 

 bene fundata. In any case, what Leibniz desires specially 

 to maintain is that space and time are not real substances 

 nor attributes of real substances. They are nothing but 

 orders or arrangements of co-existing and successive 

 things or phenomena. Individual substances or Monads, 

 which are the sole realities, are not to be conceived as 

 partes extra paries: the central thought of Leibniz's 

 philosophy is that this quantitative aspect of things 

 should be treated as subordinate, as not belonging to the 

 essence of real things. Hence space is to be regarded, 

 riot as the mutual exclusiveness of real substances, but as 

 simply the order of co- existence pre-supposed in the 

 aggregation or grouping of phenomenal things, while 

 time is the order of sequence of phenomena. 'Time, 

 extension, motion, and the continuous in general, in the 

 way in which they are considered in mathematics, are 

 only ideal things ; that is to say, things which express 

 possibilities, just as numbers do. Hobbes has even 

 denned space as phantasma existentis. But, to speak 

 more exactly, extension is the order of possible co- existences, 

 as time is the order of possibilities which are inconsistent, 

 but which have nevertheless some connexion. Thus 



1 G. ii. 118. 2 Hist, of Philosophy (Eng. tr.), vol. ii. p. 185. 

 3 Cf. Epistola ad Des Bosses (1706^ (E. 436 b ; G. ii. 306). 



