CHAPTER II

THE MONAD'S PERSPECTIVE

As the same city regarded from different sides appears as other cities, and is, as it were, multiplied perspectively, so, by the infinite multitude of simple substances, it comes about that there are as many different universes; they are, however, but the perspectives of one only, according to the special point of view of each monad.-LEIBNIZ.

THE monad mirrors the universe and the universe consists of monads, for there is nothing real but monads; to each monad therefore the other monads must present an external, objective aspect; how is this possible?

It is not difficult to recognize the facts upon which the monadic theory is based; it is difficult to avoid presenting those facts in a spatial setting and so completely concealing their true nature. We may easily be convinced of this. Nothing is clearer than that the distinction between our body and our mind, between the things of the body and the ideas of the mind, is a distinction between what is spatial and what is not spatial. Our body is spatial, our mind is not spatial. Yet whenever we think of a mind possessed of a wider or narrower range of perception we invariably find that we form the idea by the device of imagining our body to possess larger or smaller spatial proportions. A large mind in the sense of a wide range of perception seems necessarily associated with bodily bulk. Thus when Milton describes Satan after his fall, lying with the rebel angels prone on the lake of fire, his body covers many a rood."

Yet it is clear from the definition of the monad as a centre of activity into which the universe is mirrored that the body is not that centre but itself a part of the mirrored universe. The body is not the subject for which the universe

is object, the body is itself part of the object which exists in and for the subject. The spatial proportions of the universe, and of the body as part of that universe, are the perspective of the monad. This means that if we accept the theory of the monads, it follows necessarily that we cannot regard space as an absolute reality within which the monads are. Space is not the unity or continuity which binds the monads together, and makes the many one. Space is the unity which binds together the diversity within the monad, but that is because the monad's activity is centralized and the universe is its perspective.

When I look up into the starry sky on a clear night, the immediate object of my visual perception is a firmament bespangled with myriad stars. Science has discovered that those stars are distant suns. An infinite universe of boundless potentiality and illimitable diversity lies beyond my ken, outside the system to which I belong and the range of activity which makes up my life. Yet every ray of light from however distant a star reveals to me, when I interpret its message, that the world from which it comes is of like nature with my world, subject to the same order, the same natural laws, and in every sense continuous with it. Again, beneath and within the smallest compass which I can distinguish as part of my tangible world there is a universe of infinite diversity. Science reveals to me that my tangible world is composed of ultimate constituents of a nature which I denote by the term electrical, constituents which form molecules, atoms, electrons, etc. The immediate objects of sense which lead me to conceive this world reveal in that world a unity of structure and a uniformity of behaviour which show it to be continuous not only with my own world but with the infinite stellar universe beyond. What is the nature and what the origin of this systematic unity? What is it makes this one many, this many one? What is the principle of interpretation which this unity demands ?

The monadic theory rejects the view that the unity and diversity of the universe are qualities or characters inherent in an objective reality independent of the mind, presented

or given in passive contemplation. If we assume or posit such a reality, and suppose its presentation to the mind, and suppose the mind possessed of the power of discernment, it is still unintelligible how or that such reality could itself reveal to contemplation the character which is implied in saying that in it the many are one and one many. And we are in fact forced, as I shall endeavour to show, when we seek to make such character rational, to introduce a transcendent source of the unity.

The monadic activity is self-centred. The monad acts as a seed or germ acts when it is converting its inner potentiality into outward expression and action. A monad does not create or produce from itself the universe, for the monads are the true atoms of nature, and monad does not create monad. There are not monads and universes, but to each monad belongs its universe, which is the universe. The monad determines from within the perspective of its universe, inasmuch as it is a centre from which the universe is viewed and into which the universe is mirrored. In this perspective lies the principle of unity and diversity. Each monad is confined to its own perspective. But the very isolation which is thus affirmed postulates the infinity of monads, for there are infinite perspectives.

Every monad exists both in itself and for the other monads. In itself it is a subject of experience, living its experience, with its own perspective. For the other monads it is part of each monad's universe within whose perspective it comes and of which perspective it forms part. Thus while every monad is thing-in-itself and also thing-foranother, it is not for another what it is in itself and it is not in itself what it is for another.

It is not easy to see why unity and diversity in nature cannot be directly apprehended as attributes of a reality in which they are inherent, and it is most important to demonstrate this impossibility clearly at the outset. To ordinary common sense the monadic theory presents a distinct air of paradox. It seems unnecessary and even perverse to common sense to reject an interpretation of nature which is plain and straightforward for one which,

whatever fascination it may have for dialecticians, calls for an unusually difficult intellectual effort and carries us in the reverse direction to that of our ordinary habits of thought. The interpretation of uncritical common sense is that we discover in nature unity and uniformity because they are there to be discovered. It is part of a general uncritical theory, and as it is not unusual for philosophers to appeal to what they call common sense it is very important to state the theory with precision. Common sense is the view that things are in their independent existence what they are as we know them. It is not merely the belief or opinion that things exist independently of whether we know them or not, it is the affirmation that things which we know are in their own nature what they are as objects in our knowledge of them. Common sense is not dualistic in the philosophical meaning of the term, it does not distinguish mind as thinking substance from matter as extended substance. It has no theory of knowledge; it simply accepts what is as what may be known and what is known as being in itself what it is known as being.

Many philosophers have claimed for their theories of knowledge and reality that they simply formulate this naive realism of common sense. Berkeley, for example, was insistent that his theory, esse is percipi, expressed the ordinary unsophisticated man's meaning. We may admit that so far Berkeley was right, yet when he sought to justify the common-sense view of the permanence of existing things, -the view that our perceptions which we are actually perceiving are continuous with identical objectively existing perceptions which we are not perceiving (and this is common sense), he was driven to posit as the ground of this continuity a transcendent cause. The claim of Berkeley to represent common sense is indeed one of the paradoxes of philosophy. Berkeley's theory is literally what the ordinary man to be consistent must mean, yet it is what the ordinary man never does mean. So that we may quote Boswell's words in the famous story of Dr. Johnson claiming to have refuted Berkeley's theory by kicking a stone, "that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it.”

The reason is that our first reflexion on experience, the ordinary reflexion which leads to scientific knowledge, brings home to us the evident fact that the particular form nature assumes in immediate apprehension is determined by perspective. Perspective clearly appertains to the mind and depends on its standpoint of observation and is not inherent in the object apprehended. Hence arises the distinction between the object of scientific knowledge and the object of direct sense-perception. Science we regard as peculiarly concerned with the task of determining what reality is when divested of every appearance which can be attributed to the observer's perspective.

Dialectical disquisitions on what common sense means, or ought to mean, by its affirmation of the real existence of the objective world, have an air of unreality. They never seem to come to close quarters with a real issue. It is both more important and more impressive to examine the notion of reality which serves as a basis of physical science. Just as the space of geometry is not the space of sense experience, so the reality which science treats as actual independent existence is not the reality of sense experience. It is a conceived, not a perceived, reality, and if it must be formulated in terms of a potential perception it is a perception which under no possible conditions could be actual. It is a conceptual reality which experience is held both to postulate and interpret. It is important therefore to lay this concept bare, that is, to show what is implied not in any particular theory of the constitution of the external world, but in the general notion, deeply seated in common-sense thought, that there is a real world with its own nature, independent of the mind whose object it may be, and that this world, whatever its nature, and however inaccessible to us, is the ground of knowledge and the only criterion of the validity of knowledge. When we examine the notion and follow out its implications we are likely to be amazed at its inconsistency, and we may even come to feel surprise that we should have somehow come to believe it as a matter of course, the antecedent improbability of its truth makes belief in it seem so extravagant.