The mind-units which make up body will not of course be developed and fully conscious minds like yours or mine, and it is only for want of a better word that we call them minds at all.  They will be mere unselfconscious representations of their physical environment, as it might be seen from the physical point to which they belong by a human mind paying no attention at all to its own seeing.  How many of these rudimentary ‘minds’ will there be in my body?  As many as you like—­as many as it is possible there should be—­say an infinite number and have done with it.

We may now observe how this hypothesis introduces real formal unity without prejudicing mechanical plurality.  Each of the mind-units in my body is itself and substantially distinct.  But since each, in its own way and according to its own position, represents the superior and more developed mind which I call ‘me’, they will order themselves according to a common form.  The order is real, not accidental:  it is like the order of troops on a parade-ground.  Each man is a distinct active unit, but each is really expressing by his action the mind of the officer in command.  He is expressing no less his relation to the other men in the ranks—­to obey the officer is to keep in step with them.  So the metaphysical units of the body, being all minds, represent one another as well as the dominant mind:  one another co-ordinately, the dominant mind subordinately.

But if the metaphysically real units of the body are of the nature of mind, then the mind is a mind among minds, a spirit-atom among spirit-atoms.  What then constitutes its superiority or dominance, and makes it a mind par excellence?  Well, what constitutes the officer an officer?  Two things:  a more developed mentality and the fact of being obeyed.  In military life these two factors are not always perfectly proportioned to one another, but in the order of Leibniz’s universe they are.  A fuller power to represent the universe is necessarily combined with dominance over an organized troop of members; for the mind knows the universe only in so far as the universe is expressed in its body.  That is what the [24] finitude of the mind means.  Only an infinite mind appreciates the whole plurality of things in themselves; a finite mind perceives them in so far as mirrored in the physical being of an organized body of members.  The more adequate the mirror, the more adequate the representation:  the more highly organized the body, the more developed the mind.

The developed mind has an elaborate body; but the least developed mind has still some body, or it would lack any mirror whatever through which to represent the world.  This means, in effect, that Leibniz’s system is not an unmitigated spiritual atomism.  For though the spiritual atoms, or monads, are the ultimate constituents out of which nature is composed, they stand composed together from the beginning in a minimal order which cannot be broken up.  Each