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Locke’s account of innate ideas and of sensation is only preparatory to a discussion of the ideas got by sensation. His explanation of the mode of knowledge leads up to an explanation of the things known. He remains true to his fundamental idea that before we come to conclusions about any matters we must “examine our own ability.” He deals first with ideas got by the senses, whether by some one or by their conjoint action. Of these the ideas of solidity, of extension, and of duration are of most concern to us. They form as near an approach to a general philosophy of nature as may be found anywhere in Locke. They are, too, the germ from which grew the ideas of matter, of space, and of time, which, however more comprehensive in scope and more amply worked out in detail, characterize succeeding British thought, and which are reproduced to-day by Mr. Spencer.

“The idea of solidity we receive by our touch.” “The ideas we get by more than one sense are of space or extension, figure, rest, and motion.” These sentences contain the brief statement of the chief contention of the sensational school. Locke certainly was not conscious when he wrote them that they were the expression of ideas which should resolve the world of matter and of space into a dissolving series of accidentally associated sensations; but such was none the less the case. When he writes, “If any one asks me what solidity is, I send him to his senses to inform him,” he is preparing the way for Berkeley, and for a denial of all reality beyond the feelings of the individual mind. When he says that “we get the idea of space both by sight and touch,” this statement, although appearing truistic, is none the less the source of the contention of Hume that even geometry contains no necessary or universal elements, but is an account of sensible appearances, relative, as are all matters of sensation.

Locke’s ideas may be synopsized as follows: It is a sufficient account of solidity to say that it is got by touch and that it arises from the resistance found in bodies to the entrance of any other body. “It is that which hinders the approach of two bodies when they are moved towards one another.” If not identical with matter, it is at all events its most essential property. “This of all others seems the idea most intimately connected with and essential to body, so as nowhere else to be found or imagined, but only in matter.” It is, moreover, the source of the other properties of matter. “Upon the solidity of bodies depend their mutual impulse, resistance, and protrusion.” Solidity, again, “is so inseparable an idea from body that upon that depends its filling of space, its contact, impulse, and communication of motion upon impulse.” It is to be distinguished, therefore, from hardness, for hardness is relative and derived, various bodies having various degrees of it; while solidity consists in utter exclusion of other bodies from the space possessed by any one, so that the hardest body has no more solidity than the softest.

The close connection between solidity and matter makes it not only possible, but necessary, to distinguish between matter and extension as against the Cartesians, who had identified them. In particular Locke notes three differences between these notions. Extension includes neither solidity nor resistance; its parts are inseparable from one another both really and mentally, and are immovable; while matter has solidity, its parts are mutually separable, and may be moved in space. From this distinction between space and matter it follows, according to Locke, that there is such a thing as a vacuum, or that space is not necessarily a plenum of matter. Matter is that which fills space; but it is entirely indifferent to space whether or not it is filled. Space is occupied by matter, but there is no essential relation between them. Solidity is the essence of matter; emptiness is the characteristic of space. “The idea of space is as distinct from that of solidity as it is from that of scarlet color. It is true, solidity cannot exist without extension, neither can scarlet color exist without extension; but this hinders not that they are distinct ideas.”

Thus there is fixed for us the idea of space as well as of matter. It is a distinct idea; that is, absolute or independent in itself, having no intrinsic connection with phenomena in space. Yet it is got through the senses. How that can be a matter of sensation which is not only not material, but has no connection in itself with matter, Locke does not explain. He thinks it sufficient to say that we see distance between bodies of different color just as plainly as we see the colors. Space is, therefore, a purely immediate idea, containing no more organic relation to intelligence than it has to objects. We get the notion of time as we do that of space, excepting that it is the observation of internal states and not of external objects which furnishes the material of the idea. Time has two elements,—succession and duration. “Observing what passes in the mind, how of our ideas there in train some constantly vanish, and others begin to appear, we come by the idea of succession, and by observing a distance in the parts of this succession we get the idea of duration.” Whether, however, time is something essentially empty, having no relation to the events which fill it, as space is essentially empty, without necessary connection with the objects which fill it, is a question Locke does not consider. In fact, the gist of his ideas upon this point is as follows: there is actually an objective space or pure emptiness; employing our senses, we get the idea of this space. There is actually an objective time; employing reflection, we perceive it. There is not the slightest attempt to form a philosophy of them, or to show their function in the construction of an intelligible world, except in the one point of the absolute independence of matter and space.

It cannot be said that Leibniz criticises the minor points of Locke in such a way as to throw much light upon them, or that he very fully expresses his own ideas about them. He contents himself with declaring that while the senses may give instances of space, time, and matter, and may suggest to intelligence the stimuli upon which intelligence realizes these notions from itself, they cannot be the source of these notions themselves; finding the evidence of this in the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, and pure physics. For these sciences deal with the notions of space, time, and matter, giving necessary and demonstrative ideas concerning them, which the senses can never legitimate. He further denies the supposed absoluteness or independence of space, matter, and motion. Admitting, indeed, the distinction between extension and matter, he denies that this distinction suffices to prove the existence, or even the possibility, of a vacuum, and ends with a general reference to his doctrine of pre-established harmony, as serving to explain these matters more fully and more accurately.

Leibniz has, however, a complete philosophy of nature. In his other writing, he explains the ideas of matter and force in their dependence upon his metaphysic, or doctrine of spiritual entelechies. The task does not at first sight appear an easy one. The reality, according to Leibniz, is purely spiritual, does not exist in space nor time, and is a principle of activity following its own law,—that of reflecting the universe of spiritual relations. How from this world of ideal, unextended, and non-temporal dynamic realities we are to pass over to a material world of extension, with its static existence in space, and transitory passage in time, is a question challenging the whole Leibnizian system. It is a question, however, for which Leibniz himself has provided an answer. We may not regard it as adequate; we may think that he has not truly derived the material world from his spiritual principles: but at all events he asked himself the question, and gave an answer. We shall investigate this answer by arranging what Leibniz has said under the heads of: matter as a metaphysical principle; matter as a physical phenomenon; and the relation of phenomena to absolute reality, or of the physical to the metaphysical. In connection with the second head, particularly, we shall find it necessary to discuss what Leibniz has said about space, time, and motion.

Wolff, who put the ideas of Leibniz into systematic shape, did it at the expense of almost all their significance. He took away the air of paradox, of remoteness, that characterized Leibniz’s thought, and gave it a popular form. But its depth and suggestiveness vanished in the process. Unfortunately, Wolff’s presentations of the philosophy of Leibniz have been followed by others, to whom it seemed a dull task to follow out the intricacies of a thought nowhere systematically expressed. This has been especially the case as concerns the Leibnizian doctrine of matter. A superficial interpretation of certain passages in Leibniz has led to an almost universal misunderstanding about it. Leibniz frequently says that since matter is composite or complex, it follows that there must be something simple as its basis, and this simple something is the monad. The misinterpretation just spoken of consists in supposing that Leibniz meant that matter as composite is made up of monads as simple; that the monad and matter are facts of the same order, the latter being only an aggregate, or continued collection of the former. It interpreted the conception of Leibniz in strict analogy with the atomic theory of Lucretius, excepting that it granted that the former taught that the ultimate atom, the component of all complex forms of matter, has position only, not extension, its essence consisting in its exercise of force, not in its mere space occupancy. The monad was thus considered to be in space, or at least conditioned by space relations, as is a mathematical point, although not itself spatial in the sense of being extended. Monad and matter were thus represented as facts of the same kind or genus, having their difference only in their relative isolation or aggregation.

But Leibniz repudiated this idea, and that not only by the spirit of his teaching, but in express words. Monads “are not ingredients or constituents of matter,” he says, “but only conditions of it.” “Monads can no more be said to be parts of bodies, or to come in contact with them, or to compose them, than can souls or mathematical points.” “Monads per se have no situation relative to one another.” An increase in the number of created monads, he says again, if such a thing could be supposed, would no more increase the amount of matter in existence, than mathematical points added to a line would increase its length. And again: “There is no nearness or remoteness among monads; to say that they are gathered in a point or are scattered in space, is to employ mental fictions, in trying to imagine what can only be thought.” The italicized words give the clew to the whole discussion. To make monads of the same order as corporeal phenomena, is to make them sensible, or capable of being imaged, or conditioned by space and time,—three phrases which are strictly correlative. But the monads can only be thought,—that is, their qualities are ideal, not sensible; they can be realized only by reason, not projected in forms having spatial outline and temporal habitation, that is, in images. Monads and material things, in other words, are facts of two distinct orders; they are related as the rational or spiritual and the physical or sensible. Matter is no more composed of monads than it is of thoughts or of logical principles. As Leibniz says over and over again: Matter, space, time, motion are only phenomena, although phenomena bene fundata,—phenomena, that is, having their rational basis and condition. The monads, on the other hand, are not appearances, they are realities.

Having freed our minds from the supposition that it is in any way possible to form an image or picture of the monad; having realized that it is wholly false to suppose that monads occupy position in space, and then by their continuity fill it, and make extended matter,—we must attempt to frame a correct theory of the nature of matter and its relation to the monad. We shall do this only as we realize that “matter,” so far as it has any reality, or so far as it has any real fundamentum, must be something ideal, or, in Leibniz’s language, “metaphysical.” As he says over and over again, the only realities are the substances or spiritual units of activity, to which the name “monad” is given. In the inquiry, then, after such reality as matter may have, we must betake ourselves to this unit of living energy.

Although every monad is active, it is not entirely active. There is, as we have already seen, an infinite scale of substances; and since substance is equivalent to activity, this is saying that there is an infinite scale of activities. God alone is purus actus, absolute energy, untouched by passivity or receptivity. Every other being has the element of incompleteness, of inadequacy; it does not completely represent the universe. In this passivity consists its finitude, so that Leibniz says that not even God himself could deprive monads of it, for this would be to make them equal to himself. In this passivity, incompleteness, or finitude, consists what we call matter. Leibniz says that he can understand what Plato meant when he called matter something essentially imperfect and transitory. Every finite monad is a union of two principles,—those of activity and of passivity. “I do not admit,” says Leibniz, “that there are souls existing simply by themselves, or that there are created spirits detached from all body. God alone is above all matter, since he is its author; creatures freed from matter would be at the same time detached from the universal connection of things, and, as it were, deserters from the general order.” And again, “Beings have a nature which is both active and passive; that is, material and immaterial.” And again, he says that every created monad requires both an entelechy, or principle of activity, and matter. “Matter is essential to any entelechy, and can never be separated from it, since matter completes it.” In short, the term “monad” is equivalent to the term “entelechy” only when applied to God. In every other monad, the entelechy, or energy, is but one factor. “Matter, or primitive passive power, completes the entelechy, or primitive active power, so that it becomes a perfect substance, or monad.” On the other hand, of course, matter, as the passive principle, is a mere potentiality or abstraction, considered in itself. It is real only in its union with the active principle. Matter, he says, “cannot exist without immaterial substances.” “To every particular portion of matter belongs a particular form; that is, a soul, a spirit.” To this element of matter, considered as an abstraction, in its distinction from soul, Leibniz, following the scholastics, and ultimately Aristotle, gives the name, “first” or “bare” matter. The same influence is seen in the fact that he opposes this element of matter to “form,” or the active principle.

Our starting-point, therefore, for the consideration of matter is the statement that it is receptivity, the capacity for being affected, which always constitutes matter. But what is meant by “receptivity”? To answer this question we must return to what was said about the two activities of the monad,—representation, or perception, and appetition,—and to the difference between confused and distinct ideas. The monad has appetition so far as it determines itself from within to change, so far as it follows an internal principle of energy. It is representative so far as it is determined from without, so far as it receives impressions from the universe. Yet we have learned to know that in one sense everything occurs from the spontaneity of the monad itself; it receives no influence or influxus from without; everything comes from its own depths, or is appetition. But, on the other hand, all that which so comes forth is only a mirroring or copying of the universe. The whole content of the appetition is representation. Although the monad works spontaneously, it is none the less determined in its activities to produce only reflections or images of the world. In this way appetition and representation appear to be identical. The monad is determined from within, indeed, but it is determined to exactly the same results as if wholly determined from without. What light, then, can be thrown from this distinction upon the nature of matter?

None, unless we follow Leibniz somewhat farther. If we do, we shall see that the soul is regarded as appetitive, or self-active, so far as it has clear and distinct ideas. If the monad reaches distinct consciousness, it has knowledge of self,—that is, of the nature of pure spirit,—or, what again is equivalent to this, of the nature of reality as it universally is. Such knowledge is knowledge of God, of substance, of unity, of pure activity, and of all the innate ideas which elevate the confused perceptions of sense into science. Distinct consciousness is therefore equivalent to self-activity, and this to recognition of God and the universal. But if knowledge is confused, it is not possible to see it in its relations to self; it cannot be analyzed; the rational or ideal element in it is concealed from view. In confused ideas, therefore, the soul appears to be passive; being passive, to be determined from without. This determination from without is equivalent to that which is opposed to spirit or reason, and hence appears as matter. Such is in outline the Leibnizian philosophy.

It thus is clear that merely stating that matter is passivity in the monad is not the ultimate way of stating its nature. For passivity means in reality nothing but confused representations,—representations, that is, whose significance is not perceived. The true significance of every representation is found in its relation to the ego, or pure self-activity, which, through its dependent relation upon God, the absolute self-activity and ego, produces the representation from its own ideal being. So far as the soul does not have distinct recognition of relation of all representations to self, it feels them as coming from without; as foreign to spirit; in short, as matter. Leibniz thus employs exactly the same language about confused ideas that he does about passivity, or matter. It is not possible that the monad should have distinct consciousness of itself as a mirror of the whole universe, he says, “for in that case every entelechy would be God.” Again, “the soul would be God if it could enter at once and with distinctness into everything occurring within it.” But it is necessary “that we should have passions which consist in confused ideas, in which there is something involuntary and unknown, and which represent the body and constitute our imperfection.” Again, he speaks of matter as “the mixture (mélange) of the effects of the infinite environing us.” In that expression is summed up his whole theory of matter. It is a mixture; it is, that is to say, confused, aggregated, irresolvable into simple ideas. But it is a mixture of “effects of the infinite about us;” that is, it takes its rise in the true, the real, the spiritual. It only fails to represent this as it actually is. Matter, in short, is a phenomenon dependent upon inability to realize the entire spiritual character of reality. It is spirit apprehended in a confused, hesitating, and passive manner.

It is none the less a necessary phenomenon, for it is involved in the idea of a continuous gradation of monads, in the distinction between the infinite and the finite, or, as Leibniz often prefers to put it, between the “creator” and the “created.” There is involved everywhere in the idea of Leibniz the conception of subordination; of a hierarchy of forms, each of which receives the law of its action from the next higher, and gives the law to the next lower. We have previously considered the element of passivity or receptivity as relating only to the monad which manifests it. It is evident, however, that what is passive in one, implies something active in another. What one receives, is what another gives. The reciprocal influence of monads upon one another, therefore, as harmonious members of one system, requires matter. More strictly speaking, this reciprocal influence is matter. To take away all receptivity, all passivity, from monads would be to isolate them from all relations with others; it would be to deprive them of all power of affecting or being affected by others. That is what Leibniz meant by the expression already quoted, that if monads had not matter as an element in them, “they would be, as it were, deserters from the general order.” The note of unity, of organic connection, which we found to be the essence of the Leibnizian philosophy, absolutely requires, therefore, matter, or passivity.

It must be remembered that this reciprocal influence is ideal. As Leibniz remarks, “When it is said that one monad is affected by another, this is to be understood concerning its representation of the other. For the Author of things has so accommodated them to one another that one is said to suffer (or receive from the other) when its relative value gives way to that of the other.” Or again, “the modifications of one monad are the ideal causes of the modifications of another monad, so far as there appear in one the reasons on account of which God brought about in the beginning certain modifications in another.” And most definitely of all: “A creature is called active so far as it has perfection; passive in so far as it is imperfect. One creature is more perfect than another so far as there is found in it that which serves to render the reason, a priori, for that occurring in the other; and it is in this way that it acts upon the other.”

We are thus introduced, from a new point of view and in a more concrete way, to the conception of pre-established harmony. The activity of one, the energy which gives the law to the other and makes it subordinate in the hierarchy of monads, is conceived necessarily as spirit, as soul; that which receives, which is rendered subordinate by the activity of the other, is body. The pre-established harmony is the fact that they are so related that one can receive the law of its activity from the other. Leibniz is without doubt partially responsible for the ordinary misconception of his views upon this point by reason of the illustration which he was accustomed to use; namely, of two clocks so constructed that without any subsequent regulation each always kept perfect time with the other,—as much so as if there were some actual physical connection between them. This seems to put soul and body, spirit and matter, as two co-ordinate substances, on the same level, with such natural opposition between them that some external harmony must arrange some unity of action. In causing this common idea of his theory of pre-established harmony, Leibniz has paid the penalty for attempting to do what he often reproves in others,—imagining or presenting in sensible form what can only be thought. But his other explanations show clearly enough that the pre-established harmony expresses, not a relation between two parallel substances, but a condition of dependence of lower forms of activity upon the higher for the law of their existence and activity,—in modern terms, it expresses the fact that phenomena are conditioned upon noumena; that material facts get their significance and share of reality through their relation to spirit.

We may sum up what has been said about matter as an element in the monad, or as a metaphysical principle, as follows: The existence of matter is not only not opposed to the fundamental ideas of Leibniz, but is a necessary deduction from them. It is a necessity of the principle of continuity; for this requires an infinity of monads, alike indeed in the universal law of their being, but unlike, each to each, in the specific coloring or manifestation of this law. The principle of organic unity requires that there be as many real beings as possible participating in and contributing to it. It is necessary, again, in order that there may be reciprocal influence or connection among the monads. Were it not for the material element in the monad, each would be a God; if each were thus infinite and absolute, there would be so many principles wholly independent and isolated. The principle of harmony would be violated. So much for the necessity of the material factor. As to its nature, it is a principle of passivity; that is, of ideal receptivity, of conformity to a law apparently not self-imposed, but externally laid down. This makes matter equivalent to a phenomenon; that is to say, to the having of confused, imperfect, inadequate ideas. To say that matter is correlative to confused ideas is to say that there is no recognition of its relation to self or to spirit. As Leibniz sometimes puts it, since there is an infinity of beings in the universe, each one of which exercises an ideal influence upon every other one of the series, it is impossible that this other one should realize their full meaning; they appear only as confused ideas, or as matter. To use language which Leibniz indeed does not employ, but which seems to convey his thought, the spirit, not seeing them as they really are, does not find itself in them. But matter is thus not only the confused manifestation or phenomenon of spirit, it is also its potentiality. Passivity is always relative. It does not mean complete lack of activity; that, as Leibniz says, is nothingness, and matter is not a form of nothingness. Leibniz even speaks of it as passive power. That is to say, there is an undeveloped or incomplete activity in what appears as matter, and this may be,—if we admit an infinity of time,—must be developed. When developed it manifests itself as it really is, as spirit. Confused ideas, as Leibniz takes pains to state, are not a genus of ideas antithetical to distinct; they differ only in degree or grade. They are on their way to become distinct, or else they are distinct ideas which have fallen back into an “involved” state of being. Matter, therefore, is not absolutely opposed to spirit,—on the one hand because it is the manifestation, the phenomenon, of spirit; on the other, because it is the potentiality of spirit, capable of sometime realizing the whole activity implied in it, but now latent.

Thus it is that Leibniz says that everything is “full” of souls or monads. What appears to be lifeless is in reality like a pond full of fishes, like a drop of water full of infusoria. Everything is organic down to the last element. More truly, there is no last element. There is a true infinity of organic beings wrapped up in the slightest speck of apparently lifeless matter. These illustrations, like many others which Leibniz uses, are apt to suggest that erroneous conception of the relation of monads to spirit which we were obliged, in Leibniz’s name, to correct at the outset,—the idea, namely, that matter is composed, in a spatial or mechanical way, of monads. But after the foregoing explanations we can see that what Leibniz means when he says that every portion of matter is full of entelechies or souls, like a garden full of plants, is that there is an absolute continuity of spiritual principles, each having its ideal relation with every other. There is no point of matter which does not represent in a confused way the entire universe. It is therefore as infinite in its activities as the universe. In idea also it is capable of representing in distinct consciousness, or as a development of its own self-activity, each of these infinite activities.

In a word, every created or finite being may be regarded as matter or as spirit, according as it is accounted for by its external relations, as the reasons for what happen in it are to be found elsewhere than in its own explicit activity, or according as it shows clearly in itself the reasons for its own modifications, and also accounts for changes occurring in other beings. The externally conditioned is matter; the internally conditioned, the self-explanatory, is self-active, or spirit. Since all external relations are finally dependent on organic; since the ultimate source of all explanation must be that which is its own reason; since the ultimate source of all activity must be that which is self-active,—the final reason or source of matter is spirit.