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Although Locke (see previous extract) characterized the material world in terms of the ‘primary qualities’ of things, he did make sporadic use of the traditional Aristotelian label ‘substance’, while none the less voicing some reservations about exactly what it meant. If we describe a particle as round and hard, what does it mean to add that it is a substance that is round and hard? ‘If anyone will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general,’ Locke observed, ‘he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing ideas in us.’¹

Once this troubling question had been asked, it was not long before some philosophers were suggesting that the notion of substance might be abandoned altogether (see extract 7, below). Others, however, continued to defend the concept of substance as being of the greatest importance. The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, a keen supporter of the new mathematical and corpuscular physics that flourished during the latter seventeenth century, came to the conclusion that the notion of substance provided essential metaphysical underpinning for a complete understanding of reality. In his New System, published in French in 1695, Leibniz argues that a purely mathematical account of the world, in terms of extension (size and shape) must be deficient. First, Leibniz insists that we need in our account of reality to recognize the essential unity of things: the world cannot be a mere collection of arbitrary heaps or piles of stuff – ‘an accumulation of parts ad infinitum’; sooner or later we must acknowledge some ultimate units – what Leibniz calls ‘metaphysical atoms’. And second, Leibniz maintains that size and shape alone cannot explain the activity and power found in the universe: ‘extended mass is not of itself enough, and use must also be made of the notion of force which is fully intelligible, although it falls within the sphere of metaphysics’.

Now as we have seen (extract 3 above), Descartes had explained motion by invoking the creative power and continuous conserving action of the supreme substance, God; but Leibniz argues that in favouring this ‘solution’ the supporters of Descartes were simply ‘falling back on a miracle’. Instead, Leibniz offers a metaphysical picture of the world such that activity and energy are involved at the deepest level in the ultimate individual units of being. Reality is composed of an infinite plurality of ‘metaphysical points’ or ‘atoms of substance’ (what Leibniz was later to call ‘monads’). ‘It is only unities which are real and absolutely without parts, which can be the sources of actions, and as it were the ultimate elements into which substantial things can be analysed.’ Leibniz makes it clear that the rational souls of human beings are the most important examples of such individual units of substance, or spontaneous centres of activity (and he thinks this notion underpins our independence and freedom). But even the humblest of bodies are made up of metaphysical units which have something ‘soul-like’ about them: ‘Each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.’ So, far from the ‘dead’ world of extended matter posited by Descartes, Leibnizian metaphysics presents a universe whose ultimate constituents are in some sense ‘animated’ or ‘alive’, containing within themselves the source of their activity, and internally ordered in such a way as to ensure the harmonious operation of the universe as a whole.

Although I am one of those who have done much work on mathematics, I have constantly meditated on philosophy from my youth up, for it has always seemed to me that in philosophy there was a way of establishing something solid by means of clear proofs. I had travelled far into the world of the Scholastics,² when mathematics and modern writers³ lured me out again, while still a young man. I was charmed with their beautiful way of explaining nature mechanically, and scorned, with justice, the method of those who only make use of forms or faculties, from which we learn nothing. But later, when I tried to get to the bottom of the actual principles of mechanics in order to give an explanation of the laws of nature which are known through experience, I became aware that the consideration of an extended mass is not of itself enough, and that use must also be made of the notion of force, which is fully intelligible, although it falls within the sphere of metaphysics. It seemed to me also that the opinion of those who transform or degrade the lower animals into mere machines,⁴ although it seems possible, is improbable, and even against the order of things.

At first, when I had freed myself from the yoke of Aristotle, I had believed in the void and atoms, for it is this which best satisfies the imagination. But returning to this view after much meditation, I perceived that it is impossible to find the principles of a true unity in matter alone, or in what is merely passive, since everything in it is but a collection or accumulation of parts ad infinitum. Now a multiplicity can be real only if it is made up of true unities which come from elsewhere and are altogether different from mathematical points, which are nothing but extremities of the extended and modifications out of which it is certain that nothing continuous could be compounded. Therefore, to find these real unities, I was constrained to have recourse to what might be called a real and animating point or to an atom of substance which must embrace some element of form or of activity in order to make a complete being. It was thus necessary to recall and in a manner to rehabilitate substantial forms, which are so much decried today, but in a way which makes them intelligible and separates the use which must be made of them from their previous abuse. I found then that their nature consists of force and that from this there follows something analogous to feeling and to appetite; and that therefore it was necessary to form a conception of them resembling our ordinary notion of souls. But just as the soul must not be used to explain the detail of the economy of the animal’s body, so I judged in the same way that these forms ought not to be used to explain the particular problems of nature, although they are necessary to establish true general principles. Aristotle calls them first entelechies; I call them, more intelligibly perhaps, primitive forces, which contain not only the act, or the fulfilment of possibility, but also an original activity.

I saw that these forms and these souls must be indivisible like our mind … But this truth revived the great difficulties about the origin and duration of souls and forms. For since every simple substance which possesses a true unity can have its beginning and end by miracle alone, it follows that they could not begin except by creation, nor come to an end except by annihilation. Thus (with the exception of such souls as God still wills to create expressly) I was obliged to recognize that the constitutive forms of substance must have been created with the world and that they go on subsisting always …

Nevertheless I deemed that we ought not to mix without distinction or to confuse with other forms or souls, minds or rational souls, which are of a superior order and have incomparably more perfection than those forms embedded in matter which, on my view, are to be found everywhere, since in comparison with these others, minds or rational souls are little gods, made in the image of God, and having in them some glimmering of divine light. This is why God governs minds as a prince governs his subjects, or as a father cares for his children; whereas he disposes of other substances as an engineer handles his machines. Thus minds have special laws which set them above the revolutions of matter, by the very order God has introduced into them; and it may truly be said that all the rest are made for them alone, the very revolutions being arranged for the felicity of the virtuous and the punishment of the wicked …

But there still remained the more important question of what becomes of these souls or forms at the death of the animal, or at the destruction of the individual unit of organized substance. This question is the more awkward, inasmuch as it seems unreasonable that souls should remain useless in a chaos of confused matter. This ultimately made me decide that there was only one sensible thing to believe; that is to maintain the conservation not only of the soul but also of the animal itself and of its organic machine; even though the destruction of its grosser parts has reduced it to such smallness that it evades our senses, just as it did before birth. Moreover, nobody can mark precisely the true time of death, which may for a long time pass for a mere suspension of observable actions, and fundamentally is never anything else but that in the case of simple animals; witness the resuscitations of flies which have been drowned and then buried under powdered chalk, and several similar instances, which make us realize that there might be other resuscitations, and in cases which were much further gone, if men were in a position to readjust the machine … It is therefore natural that since an animal has always been living and organized … it should also always continue to be so. And since there is thus no first birth or entirely new generation of the animal it follows that it will suffer no final extinction or complete death, in the strict metaphysical sense …

But rational souls obey much more exalted laws, and are immune from anything which could make them lose the status of citizens of the society of minds, since God has so provided that no changes of matter could make them lose the moral qualities of their personality. And it may be said with truth that everything tends to the perfection not only of the universe in general, but also of these created things in particular, who are destined for so high a degree of happiness that the universe becomes concerned in it by virtue of the divine goodness which is communicated to each created being, in so far as sovereign wisdom can permit …

I am as willing as any man to give the moderns their due but I think they have carried reform too far, among other things in confusing the natural with the artificial, through not having had sufficiently exalted ideas of the majesty of Nature. They conceive that the difference between her machines and ours is but the difference between the great and the small. This recently led a very clever man to remark that when looking at Nature from near at hand she appears less admirable than we thought, being no more than a workman’s shop. I believe that this does not give a sufficiently just idea, or one sufficiently worthy of her, and there is no system except mine which properly exhibits the immense distance which really lies between the least productions and mechanisms of Divine wisdom and the greatest achievements of the skill of a limited mind. This difference is one not merely of degree, but of kind also. It must be recognized that Nature’s machines possess a truly infinite number of organs, and are so well protected and armed against all accidents that it is not possible to destroy them. A natural machine still remains a machine in its least parts, and, what is more, it always remains the very same machine that it was, being merely transformed by the different foldings it receives, and being sometimes stretched, sometimes contracted and as it were concentrated, when we think that it is destroyed.

Furthermore, by means of the soul or form, there is a true unity which corresponds to what is called the I in us; a thing which could not occur in artificial machines, nor in the simple mass of matter, however organized it may be. This can only be regarded as like an army or a flock, or like a pond full of fish, or a watch made up of springs and wheels. Yet if there were no true substantial unities, there would be nothing real or substantial in the collection. It was this that [has led some philosophers to] abandon Descartes and to adopt Democritus’s theory of atoms, in order to find a true unity. But atoms of matter are contrary to reason, besides the fact that they also are composed of parts, since the invincible attachment of one part to another (granted that this could be reasonably conceived or supposed) would not destroy their diversity. It is only atoms of substance, that is to say unities which are real and absolutely without parts, which can be the sources of actions, and the absolute first principles of the composition of things, and as it were the ultimate elements into which substantial things can be analysed. They might be called metaphysical points; there is about them something vital and a kind of perception, and mathematical points are their points of view for expressing the universe. But when corporeal substances are contracted all their organs constitute for us but a physical point. Thus physical points are indivisible in appearance only: mathematical points are exact, but they are nothing but modalities. It is only metaphysical points, or points of substance (constituted by forms or souls), which are both exact and real; and without them there would be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no plurality.

Once I had established these things, I thought I had reached port; but when I set myself to reflect on the union of the soul with the body, I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea. For I could find no way of explaining how the body causes something to happen in the soul, or vice versa, nor how one created substance can communicate with another. M. Descartes left the field at this stage, as far as we can gather from his writings; but his disciples, realizing that the common opinion is inconceivable, maintained that we are aware of the qualities of bodies because God produces thoughts in the soul on the occasion of the movements of matter; and when our soul wishes to move the body in its turn, they deemed that it is God that moves it for the soul. And as the communication of motion seemed to them likewise inconceivable, they maintained that God gives motion to a body on the occasion of the motion of another body. This is what they call the System of occasional causes, which has become very fashionable owing to the fine reflections of the author of the Recherche de la Vérité.⁵

It must be admitted that they have gone a great way in regard to this problem by showing what cannot possibly take place; but their explanation of what does in fact occur does not remove the difficulty. It is quite true that in the strict metaphysical sense there is no real influence exerted by one created substance on another, and that all things, with all their realities, are continually produced by the power of God: but to solve these problems it is not enough to make use of the general cause, and to drag in what is called the deus ex machina.⁶ For when this is done without giving any further explanation in terms of the order of secondary causes, this is properly speaking to fall back on miracle. In philosophy, we must attempt to give an explanation showing in what way things are brought about by the Divine wisdom, in conformity with the notion of the subject in question.

Being thus constrained to grant that it is impossible for the soul or for any other true substance to receive anything from without, except by Divine omnipotence, I was insensibly led to adopt a view which surprised me, but which seems inevitable, and which does in fact possess very great advantages and considerable beauties. This view is that we must say that God first created the soul, and every other real unity, in such a way that everything in it must spring from within itself, by a perfect spontaneity with regard to itself, and yet in a perfect conformity with things outside. And thus, since our internal sensations (those, that is to say, which are in the soul itself and not in the brain or in the subtle parts of the body) are but phenomena dependent upon external entities, or rather are really appearances, and, as it were, well-ordered dreams, these internal perceptions within the soul itself must arise in it from its own original constitution, that is to say through the natural representative ability (capable of expressing entities outside itself in relation to its organs) with which it has been endowed since its creation, and which constitutes its individual character. It follows from this that, since each of these substances exactly represents the whole universe in its own way and from a certain point of view, and since the perceptions or expressions of external things reach the soul at the proper time by virtue of its own laws and, as it were, in a world apart, as if nothing else existed but only God and itself … there will be a perfect agreement between all these substances, producing the same effect as would occur if these communicated with one another by means of a transmission of species or qualities, as the common run of philosophers maintain. Furthermore, the organized mass, within which is the point of view of the soul, is itself more nearly expressed by it, and finds itself in its turn ready to act of itself according to the laws of the corporeal machine whenever the soul desires, without either disturbing the laws of the other, the animal spirits and the blood having precisely at the given moment the motions necessary to make them respond to the passions and perceptions of the soul; and it is this mutual relation, regulated in advance in every substance in the universe, which produces what we call their communication, and which alone constitutes the union of the soul and the body. And this makes it possible to understand how the soul has its seat in the body by an immediate presence, which could not be closer than it is, since it is present in the way in which the unity is present in that resultant of unities which is a plurality.

This hypothesis is very possible. For why should not God be able in the first instance to give to substance a nature or internal force capable of producing for it in an orderly way (as if it were an automaton, spiritual and formal, but free in the case of a substance which has a share of reason) everything that is going to happen to it, that is to say all the appearances and expressions it is going to have, and that without the assistance of any created thing? This is rendered all the more probable by the fact that the nature of substance necessarily requires and essentially involves a progress or change, without which it would have no force to act. And since it is the very nature of the soul to be representative of the universe in a very exact way (although with varying distinctness), the sequence of representations which the soul produces for itself will naturally correspond to the sequence of changes in the universe itself: while on the other hand the body has also been adjusted to the soul, in regard to the experiences in which the latter is conceived as acting outside itself. This is all the more reasonable in that bodies are only made for those minds which are capable of entering into society with God, and of celebrating His glory. Thus once we recognize the possibility of this hypothesis of agreements, we recognize also that it is the most reasonable one, and that it gives a wonderful idea of the harmony of the universe and of the perfection of the works of God.

There is in it this great advantage also, that instead of saying that we are free only in appearance and in a manner adequate for practice, as several ingenious men have held, we must rather say that we are determined in appearance only; and that in strict metaphysical language we are perfectly independent as regards the influence of all other created things. This again shows up in a marvellously clear light the immortality of our soul, and the ever uniform conservation of our individual self, which is perfectly well regulated of its own nature, and is beyond the reach of all accidents from outside, whatever the appearances to the contrary. No system has ever so clearly exhibited our exalted position. Since each mind is as it were a world apart, sufficient unto itself, independent of all other created things, including the infinite, expressing the universe, it is as lasting, as subsistent, and as absolute as the very universe of created things itself. We must therefore conclude that it must always play its part in the way most suited to contribute to the perfection of that society of all minds which constitutes their moral union in the City of God. Here, too, is a new and wonderfully clear proof of the existence of God. For this perfect agreement of all these substances, which have absolutely no communication with one another, could only come from the one common cause …

These considerations, metaphysical though they may appear, are yet wonderfully useful in physics, for establishing the laws of motion … For the truth is that in the shock of impact each body suffers only from its own elasticity, caused by the motion which is already in it … It is reasonable to attribute to bodies true motions, in accordance with the supposition which explains phenomena in the most intelligible way; and this way of speaking is in conformity with the notion of activity which we have just established.