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Monadology Quotes

Browse 7 quotes about Monadology.

Monadology Quotes

“This connection of all created things with every single one of them and their adaptation to every single one, as well as the connection and adaptation of every single thing to all others, has the result that every single substance stands in relations which express all the others. Whence every single substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.”

“And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.”

“Now, since in the divine ideas there is an infinity of possible universes of which only one can exist, the choice made by God must have a sufficient reason which determines him to the one rather than to another. This reason can be found only in fitness, that is, in the degree of perfection contained in these worlds. For each possible has a right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves. Thus nothing is entirely arbitrary.”

“The temporal, contingent world is, as Leibniz said, a “collection of finite things.” It is possible only because it is underpinned by an eternal, necessary world, comprising a collection of zero-infinity things, i.e. monads.”

“Leibniz rejected the idea that fundamental reality was made up of material atoms; he posited instead that mind, particularly the Divine Mind, was the ground of reality manifest in all the infinite monads. In this theory, Leibniz actually presages many twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, including the theories of Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrist Carl Jung regarding the continuity of the inner concepts of the psyche and the outer archetypes encountered in the world of physics. For Jung, psyche—or mind—bridged that gap, and Leibniz would agree, arguing that reality is, at base, conscious. I also see similarity between Maximus the Confessor and his logoi. For all these thinkers, reality was grounded in the mind of God, though they differ quite a bit in what that entails and how that is.”