It is useless, then, to conceive representations as simply coming into existence in response to environment, and modelling themselves on environment.  They must all mutually reflect environment or they would not be representations; but they must also exist as themselves and in their own right or there would be no environment for them mutually to represent.  Since the world is infinitely various, each representor must have its own distinct character or nature, as our minds have:  that is to say, it must represent in its own individual way; and all these endlessly various representations must be so constituted as to form a mutually reflecting harmony.  Considered as a representation, each monadical existence simply reflects the universe after its own manner.  But considered as something to be represented by the others, it is a self-existent mental life, or world of ideas.  Now when we are considering the fact of representation, that which is to be represented comes first and the representation follows upon it.  Thus in considering the Leibnitian universe, we must begin with the[27] monads as self-existent mental lives, or worlds of ideas; their representation of one another comes second.  Nothing surely, then, but omnipotent creative wisdom could have pre-established between so many distinct given mental worlds that harmony which constitutes their mutual representation.

Our common-sense pluralistic thinking escapes from the need of the pre-established harmony by distinguishing what we are from what we do.  Let the world be made up of a plurality of agents in a ‘loose’ order, with room to manoeuvre and to adjust themselves to one another.  Then, by good luck or good management, through friction and disaster, by trial and error, by accident or invention, they may work out for themselves a harmony of action.  There is no need for divine preordaining here.  But on Leibniz’s view what the monads do is to represent, and what they are is representation; there is no ultimate distinction between what they are and what they do:  all that they do belongs to what they are.  The whole system of action in each monad, which fits with such infinite complexity the system of action in each other monad, is precisely the existence of that monad, and apart from it the monad is not.  The monads do not achieve a harmony, they are a harmony, and therefore they are pre-established in harmony.

Leibniz denied that he invoked God to intervene in nature, or that there was anything arbitrary or artificial about his physical theology.  He was simply analysing nature and finding it to be a system of mutual representation; he was analysing mutual representation and finding it to be of its nature intrinsically pre-established, and therefore God-dependent.  He was not adding anything to mutual representation, he was just showing what it necessarily contained or implied.  At least he was doing nothing worse than recognized scholastic practice.  Scholastic Aristotelianism explained