PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE—LEIBNITZ’S IDEAS. 33 
reacts against our own force as strongly as our own force 
acts to surmount it. Whether this resistance makes itself 
known directly, in the immediate apperception of the 
effort put forth by the J outside of itself, or whether the 
mind clothes it in some other conception, that force is de- 
finitively conceived in the same way as the JZ is conceived, 
as a pure and absolute category, with no appreciable 
shape. This active force, Leibnitz holds, differs from bare 
force of which the schools talk, in this respect, that the 
entire power, or faculty, of the scholastics, is only the im- 
minent possibility of action, which still requires, before 
passing into action, an impulse from without; but the active 
force we speak of intends a kind of actuality which holds 
a middle place between the power to act and the act itself, 
and takes effect as soon as the obstacle is removed. Asa 
clear illustration, take the instance of a weight stretching 
the cord that holds it up, or of a strung bow. Or, again, 
we cannot possibly describe in what respect a body in 
motion, at each one of the points it successively occupies, 
differs from a body at rest, unless we add that at each of 
those points it tends to go onward. 
__ The mind thus takes in, by the method of metaphysical 
abstraction, the primitive capacities of action, the actuali- 
ties, the powers that give to matter its dynamic charac- 
teristics. Leibnitz considers these capacities, to which he 
also gives the name of monads, as real and absolute prin- 
ciples, the sum of which in Nature is always the same, 
while the quantity of motion in Nature is variable. Every 
sort of phenomenon resolves itself into these substantial 
unities, the number of which is infinite, and which are the 
only mode we have of conceiving bodies and souls. Atoms 
of matter are contrary to reason—apart from their being 
themselves made up of parts — because, however invin- 
cible the attachment of one part to another may be, that 
does not alter the fact of their diversity. There exist only 
