36 NATURE AND LIFE. 
discover in the will. We can conceive of spiritual sub- 
stance in an infinite number of various degrees, which may. 
be either superior or inferior to the se/f; we can conceive 
of nothing active that is not similar to it. Since all our 
ideas proceed from profound reflection on ourselves, we 
could know nothing of being, if we did not find being in 
ourselves. This is the same as saying that the intellect 
contains in itself certain primordial notions, which are the 
starting-point and the condition of all others. In other 
words, it is declaring that ideas exist in the mind anterior 
to experience, dependent on the very constitution of that 
mind. Aristotle and Locke compared the soul to a blank 
tablet, on which the senses and experience proceed to in- 
scribe their teachings. Leibnitz maintains that it origi- 
nally holds the principles of many ideas and doctrines, 
which outward objects merely call into action at fitting 
times. With Plato, with St. Paul, when he declares that 
the law of God is written in our hearts, with Scaliger, who 
called them seeds of eternity, the author of “ Monadology” 
admits these fundamental concepts of the understanding as 
the bases of all knowledge. He compares them to living 
fires, to luminous rays hidden within us, which the contact 
of sense and of outward objects brings to view, as sparks 
that leap out on striking flint with steel. And these 
flashes are visible more than in any other thing in the gift 
of perceiving the connection of things, that is, in the reason. 
In what relation does the soul, this especially active 
monad, find itself to be with those monads of a lower 
order, the elements of the body? In Leibnitz’s view, that 
organized mass by which the soul makes itself known, being 
of a nature very similar to it, acts in turn of its own accord, 
whenever the soul wills it, without any clashing between 
the laws of either, the spirits and the blood performing at 
such times exactly the required motions in correspondence 
with the soul’s passions and perceptions. It is this mutual 

