/lit/ - Literature

>>12039220
>I take it for granted that every created thing can change, and thus that created monads can change. I hold in fact that every monad changes continually.

>These principles gave me a natural way of explaining the union of the soul with the organic body, or rather their conformity with one another. Soul and body each follow their own laws; and are in agreement in virtue of the fact that, since they all represent the same universe. there is a pre-established harmony among all substances.

>Imagine there were a machine whose structure produced thought, feeling, and perception; we can conceive of its being enlarged while maintaining the same relative proportions among its parts, so that we could walk into it as we can walk into a mill. Suppose we do walk into it; all we would find there are cogs and levers and so on pushing one another, and never anything to account for a perception. So perception must be sought in simple substances, not in composite things like machines. And that is all that can be found in a simple substance—perceptions and changes in perceptions; and those changes are all that the internal actions of simple substances can consist in.

>We could give the name ‘entelechy’ to all simple substances or created monads, because they have within them a certain perfection; there is a kind of self-sufficiency which makes them sources of their own internal actions—makes them immaterial automata, as it were.

-- GWF/M

based leibniz