monad, if it is to be anything at all, must be a continuing finite representation of the universe, and to be that it must have a body, that is to say, it must have other monads in a permanent relation of mutual correspondence with it.  And if you said to Leibniz, ’But surely any physical body can be broken up, and this must mean the dissolution of the organic relation between its monadical constituents,’ he would take refuge in the infinitesimal.  The wonders revealed by that new miracle, the microscope, suggested what the intrinsic divisibility of space itself suggests—­whatever organization is broken up, there will still be a minute organization within each of the fragments which remains unbroken—­and so ad infinitum.  You will never come down to loose monads, monads out of all organization.  You will never disembody the monads, and so remove their representative power; you will only reduce their bodies and so impoverish their representative power.  In this sense no animal dies and no animal is generated.  Death is the reduction and generation the enrichment of some existing monad’s body; and, by being that, is the enrichment or the reduction of the monad’s mental life.

‘But,’ our common sense protests, ’it is too great a strain on our credulity to make the real nature of things so utterly different from what sense and science make of them.  If the real universe is what you say it is, why do our minds represent it to us as they do?’ The philosopher’s answer is, ’Because they represent it.  According to the truth of things, each monad is simply its own mental life, its own world-view, its own thoughts and desires.  To know things as they are would be simultaneously to live over, as though from within and by a miracle of sympathy, the [25] biographies of an infinite number of distinct monads.  This is absolutely impossible.  Our senses represent the coexistent families of monads in the gross, and therefore conventionally; what is in fact the mutual representation of monads in ordered systems, is represented as the mechanical interaction of spatially extended and material parts.’  This does not mean that science is overthrown.  The physical world-view is in terms of the convention of representation, but it is not, for all that, illusory.  It can, ideally, be made as true as it is capable of being.  There is no reason whatever for confusing the ‘well-grounded seemings’ of the apparent physical world with the fantastic seemings of dream and hallucination.

So far the argument seems to draw whatever cogency it has from the simplicity and naturalness of the notion of representation.  The nature of idea, it is assumed, is to represent plurality in a unified view.  If idea did not represent, it would not be idea.  And since there is idea (for our minds at least exist and are made up of idea) there is representation.  It belongs to idea to represent, and since the whole world has now been interpreted as a system of mutually representing ideations, or ideators, it might seem that all their mutual relations are perfectly natural, a harmony of agreement which could not be other than it is.  But if so, why does Leibniz keep saying that the harmony is pre-established, by special and infinitely elaborate divine decrees?