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of conscious Deity. Not even the central monad in an 
organism, be its internal processes conscious or unconscious, 
has power over that organism, for no created monad can act 
upon or be acted upon by another. It is God, who alone is the 
sufficient cause of all things. His mind, in which no ideas are 
obscure, is the “ region ” of the “ ideal reasons ” of all things, 
and it is He who has pre-established the harmony between 
mind and body, causing the latter to respond to the states and 
acts of the former. The whole system of Leibnitz is simply a 
system of concrete living idealism. Dead, brute matter/ as 
popularly conceived, he justly rejects as an absurd, irrational 
quantity. Everywhere is action, life ; and these are incon- 
ceivable for him without some sort of an ideal aspect. Hence 
the primary, monadic conception of substance as a metaphysical 
point, a centre of immanent action, all the changes of which 
have an ideal aspect, “ the representation of plurality in unity,” 
which Leibnitz defines as perception. The consciousness* of 
perception, or apperception, belongs to monads of higher 
order, having practically at their service systems of inferior 
monads (i.e. bodily organisms), and even they possess this per- 
fection imperfectly; for there remains always much in their 
spiritual endowments or their mental experience, which the 
limitations of their finite nature, or circumstances, prevent 
them from distinctly apprehending. Since the higher monad 
(the animal soul, the human spirit) may, demonstrablv, have 
ideas (“perceptions”) without discursively knowing it, Leibnitz 
is in so far justified by the nearest analogy in attributing “ in- 
sensible perception” to the lowest monads. But the lower 
and more obscure the “intelligent” life of the creature, so 
much the more completely does he regard it as dependent, not 
only for its origin, but also for the law of its behaviour, on God, 
in whom the light of conscious intelligence is perfect. 
Ueberweg {History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 108) points to 
the possible or partial influence on Leibnitz of « Glisson, an 
English physician, and the author of a Tractatus de Natura Sub- 
stanticE energetica, seu de Vita Natures, London, 1G72, in which 
motion, instinct, and ideas are attributed to all substances — and 
English Platonists, such as More and Cudworth, the latter of 
whom assumed the existence of a plastic force.” CudwortlPs 
doctrine of a “plastic nature,” or a “ plastic life of nature,” is 
expounded in book I., chap, iii., of his Intellectual System oj 
the Universe (1678). Deeming it evident that nature is under 
rational control, and regarding materialistic hvpotheses as utterly 
insufficient to account for natural facts, Cudworth, the Christian 
theist, yet finds objections to the theory which would ascribe the 
