Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 28

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SAMAYASARA
modifications of the ultimate substance through the other attribute of thought. The theory of harmony through divine intervention introduced by Malcbranche for the purpose of explaining human behaviour was considered to be quite irrelevant and unnecessary by Spinoza. Man being a modification of the ultimate substance must exhibit corresponding changes both in extension and thought, the ultimate substance being the necessary condition for corresponding changes. Thus the thinking substances with which Descartes started passed through the two natured man of Malebranche and ended with the all-absorbing pantheism of Spinoza. The Spinozistic pantheism though extremely fascinating did not last long. It reduced human personality to an entirely inadequate and unimportant position and whenever there is such a deterioration of human personality there is always the inevitable reaction. The Spinozistic pantheism 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-devouring ultimate substance. Hence according to Leibniz the whole system of reality consisted of monads or individual units, some of which are thinking monads and others with a dormant 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 God substance which Spinoza introduced to bring about the unity. According to Leibniz the unity is the identical nature of the monads throughout 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 development. 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. Development 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, much less a common perception. Perception is an