38 NATURE AND LIFE. 



lished harmony among their essential activities. There is 

 a perfect concord, in virtue of which every substance, fol- 

 lowing its own laws, agrees with what all the others re- 

 quire. Leibnitz believes this harmony to cover something 

 besides mere relations of causality. He sees in the rela- 

 tions of monads influences of the same kind as those the 

 soul exerts over the body ; he believes that they have an 

 intuitive feeling one for the other, each having a kind of 

 apperception of what is not itself. He believes that, hav- 

 ing this reciprocal feeling, they exhibit a kind of irrita- 

 bility, attended by more or less consciousness, in respect 

 to their mutual qualities. He even judges that, while they 

 receive the harmonious impression of the complete world 

 in which they are factors, they reflect it in a certain way, 

 and express its law. Every substance, he says, is percipi- 

 ent and representative of the total world, according to its 

 point of view and its impressions. A Persian poet had 

 said before him, " Cleave an atom, and you will find in it a 

 sun." In a word, monads, though each possessing in itself 

 its peculiar principle of activity and direction, all act to- 

 gether in an ordered concert of energy. But what bond 

 unites them ? Are those relations we observe among them 

 only relations in our own reason ? Do mutual necessary 

 relations among them exist ? How does unity rule in the 

 world ? This is the absolutely unknown in our science, and 

 is one of the arguments urged by Leibnitz to prove the 

 existence of God. God makes the bond, the communion, 

 among substances. Moreover, these substances, logically 

 connected, though each performing its distinct part, tend 

 toward one final end. 



The law of continuity displays new, closer relations 

 among monads, and fixes the place in the scale of their 

 various conditions. Future characteristics are traced be- 

 forehand, and the marks of the past are always preserved 

 in every substance, Thus every event issues from tho^e 



