THE MONADOLOGY 265 



82. As regards minds [esprits] or rational souls, though 

 I find that what I have just been saying is true of all 

 living beings and animals (namely that animals and souls 

 come into being when the world begins and no more 

 come to an end than the world does), yet there is this 

 peculiarity in rational animals, that their spermatic 

 animalcules, so long as they are only spermatic, have 

 merely ordinary or sensuous [sensitive] souls ; but when 

 those which are chosen [e7ws], so to speak, attain to human 

 nature through an actual conception, their sensuous souls 

 are raised to the rank of reason and to the prerogative of 

 minds [esprits 130 ]. (The'od. 91, 397.) 



also mere automata, have said exactly what I need for that half of 

 my hypothesis which concerns body. But, apart from the prin- 

 ciples which make it certain that there are Monads, of which com- 

 pound substances are only the results, the Epicurean doctrine is 

 refuted by inner experience, by our consciousness of the Ego which 

 consciously perceives the things which take place in the body ; and 

 as perception cannot be explained by figures and motions, the other 

 half of my hypothesis is established, and we are obliged to recognize 

 that there is in us an indivisible substance, which must be itself the 

 source of its phenomena. Consequently, according to this second 

 half of my hypothesis, everything takes place in the soul as if there 

 were no body ; just as, according to the first half, everything takes 

 place in the body as if there were no soul. . . . Whatever of good 

 there is in the hypotheses of Epicurus and of Plato, of the greatest 

 Materialists and the greatest Idealists, is combined here.' Keponse 

 aux Reflexions de Bayle (1702) (E. 185 ; G. iv. 559). 



1;0 This elevation of the merely sensuous soul to the rank of 

 reason might, says Leibniz, ' be attributed to the extraordinary 

 operation of God.' But he 'prefers to dispense with miracle in the 

 generation of man as in that of the other animals,' and says that 

 * among the great number of souls and animals (or at least living 

 organic bodies) which are in the seed, only those souls which are 

 destined some day to attain to human nature contain in germ 

 \_enveloppent~\ the reason which will some day appear in them, and 

 that only the organic bodies of these souls are preformed and pre- 

 disposed to take the human form some day, the other animalcules 

 or seminal living beings, in which nothing of this kind is pre- 

 established, being essentially different from them and containing 

 only what is lower.' Theodicee, 397 (E. 618 a ; G. vi. 352). This 

 question of the relation of rational to sub-rational souls is treated 

 by Leibniz in a very unsatisfactory way. If we follow out Leibniz's 



