ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XLIII 
of the 17th century, as exactly as the metaphysical speculations of 
Anaxagoras and Democritus and Epicurus represent the mental 
evolution and intellectual environment of the Greeks two thousand 
years before. The atom of Leibnitz instead of being an indivisible 
and sempiternal “solid singleness”’ is a created monad, a “manu- 
factured article,” deriving its perpetuity and power from the im- 
manent and perpetual “fulgurations of Divinity.”* It is the 
curious destiny of the atomic philosophy, let me here say, in paren- 
thesis, that it has subtended three very distinct orders of meta-_ 
physic—the polytheistic metaphysic of Greece and Rome, the 
theistic metaphysic of the Renaissance period, and the scientific 
metaphysic of our own day. 
According to Leibnitz separate classes of monads have separate 
qualities. Different degrees of aggregation in monads, differing in 
kind, make the varieties of matter. The natural mutations of 
monads proceed from an intestine force which is the principle or 
change in matter. In all simple substance there is a plurality of 
relations and affections, so that a residuum of relations and affec- 
tions remains after every transfer of affections and relations in the 
production of material changes. These material changes proceed 
according to the law of continuity, for all change of the created 
monad is only the modulus of its perdurancy.| The monad is 
inconceivable, except as a creation of Divinity. When created, it 
is destructible only by the decree of Omnipotence.t Monads 
work no changes in each other’s inner constitution, and therefore 
act on each other according to a Divine Pre-established Harmony, 
which makes each monad the mirror of the Universe, and the con- 
tinuous register of all physical changes, past, present, and future. 
Hence the order of the movement and the continuity of the pro- 
cess which have resulted in the formation of the only world pos- 
sible and the best world possible. It will be seen that we are here 
*« Dieu seul est Vunité primitive ou la substance simple originaire, dont 
toutes les monades créées ou dérivatives sont des productions, et naissent, pour 
ainsi dire, par des fulgurations continuelles de la Divinité, de moment & mo- 
ment.”? (Monadologie, prin. 47). Leib. : Opera Phil., Lat. Gal. Germ. om- 
nia. Berlin, 1840, p. 708. 
} Leibnitii Principia Philosophie, More Geometrico demonstrata, p. 38. 
jt Ibid., pp. 71, 74. 
