Samayasara

Author(s): Kundkundacharya, Hiralal Jain, A N Upadhye
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 26

INTRODUCTION
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and whenever there is such a deterioration of human personality there is always the inevitable reaction. The Spinozistic pantheisın which absorbed all thinking things and reduced them to non-entities was followed by Leibniz' monadism.
Leibniz wanted to restore the reality of individual personality. He did not relish the theory of an all-clevouring ultimate substance. Hence according to Leibniz the whole system of reality consisted of inonads or individual units, some of which are thinking monads and others with a dorinant thought. Thus though thought is the necessary characteristic of all monads it was explicitly present in some monads and in others it existed in a latent form. These latter monads whose thought was latent practically appeared to be unthinking substance and thus constituted the physical realm. The unity emphasised by Spinoza between the external world and the thinking souls was thus retained by Leibniz though he threw overboard the ultimate Gud substance which Spinoza introduced to bring about the unity. According to Leibniz the unity is the identical nature of the monads thxoughout the realm of reality, though some of these constituted the apparently unthinking physical objects as contrasted with the thinking monads or souls. Thus at one stroke, the ultimate God substance of Spinoza was split up into an infinite number of monads, all identical in kind though they appeared with different degrees of developments. This theory which reduced the world to an infinite number of monads has introduced a problem in itself. Leibniz' monad was considered to be completely self-sufficient. Developinent of thought was purely an internal affair. Even in the matter of sense presentation Leibniz does not believe that the monad has an access to the external world. The monad is windowless and completely shut up within itself. There is no external world or internal world in the case of monads. The monads being completely windowless and shut up, how could they have a common object of perception ? Several individuals may perceive the same tree or stone in the external world. Monads being windowless, the common perception of single object in the external world will remain unintelligible because there is no perception at all, inuch less a common perception. Perception is an inner development in the monad and hence the supposed coinmon perception of the same thing in the external world could only be interpreted as a correspondence in the perceptive consciousness of the various windowless monads unrelated to one another. Here Leibniz introduces his theory of pre-established harmony which is merely a modified forin of Malebranche's theory of divine intervention. When the monads were first created they were so arranged that each developed in its own way and maintained a correspondence with the other monads which developed in their own way.