The review will be confined to modern
thinkers, because the views of the ancients in this regard,
though frequently of intense interest, will not carry weight in a
matter which so largely depends upon recent research and
speculation.
Leibniz profoundly influenced the course of what we may term
"animistic" thought by his doctrine of monads. Whereas
Descartes had defined substance as extension, Leibniz
conceived it as activity, or active force, and as divided up into
an infinite number and variety of individual centres, each with
its own force or life, and, up to a certain point, each with its
own consciousness. All beings are thus essentially akin, but
differ in the grades of consciousness to which they attain. But
since consciousness depends on organisation, and since
organisation is constantly developing, there is continuous
progress. Each individual monad develops from within by
virtue of a spiritual element which it possesses--that is to say,
not mechanically, but from an internal principle, implying
sensation and desire. These monads, when looked at from
without, are grouped together into various extended objects. If
we ask Leibniz how such inwardly developing centres are
combined together into a universe, his reply is that God has so
ordered things that each monad develops in definite relation to
all the rest; they all keep time, like clocks with different works,
springs, pendulums, but regulated to mark simultaneously each
period of time as it passes.
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