FRoM THE LETTERS TO JOHANN BERNOULLI 171 confess that certain organs of animals, namely the gross ones, are destroyed and broken up. But I believe that something else always survives, so that the animal (shrunken, I llow) remains still endowed with the prior entelechy; for entelechies don’t migrate from matter to matter and are never found without organs, . . From the Letters to de Volder (1699-1706) A, Leibniz to de Volder, I 24 Marchl3 April 1699 [excerpts] DON’T THINK that substance consists of extension alone, since the concept of extension is incomplete, And I don’t think that extension can be conceived through itself, but I think it is a notion that is resolvable and relative, For it is resolvable into plurality, continuity, and coexistence, that is, the existence of parts at one and the same time, Plurality is also found in number, and continuity is also found in time and motion, but coexistence is really present alone in an extended thing. But from this it appears that a something must always be assumed which is either continued or diffused, as whiteness is in milk, color, ductility and weight are in gold, and resistance is in matter” For continuity taken by itself (for extension is nothing but simultaneous continuity) no more constitutes a complete substance than does multitude or number, where there must be something numbered, repeated, and continued. And so I believe that our thought is completed and terminated 226. G I 169-72, 248-3, 268-70, 275-78, 281-83, Latin. 227. Alternatively, Leibniz may be saying that there must be a suppostun (in the Scholsstic sense) which is contained or diffused, eic. See the discussion to section 8 of the “Discourse on Metaphysics,” note 73, p. 40.172 Loemniz: Bastc Works ‘more in the notion of the dynamic than in that of extension, and one should seek no notion of power or force but that of an attribute from which change follows, chenge whose subject is the substance itself. And I don’t see what might be escaping the intellect here, The nature of the business doesn’t allow anything more explicit, like a picture, for instance, I think that the unity of an extended thing lies only in its having been abstracted, namely, when we withdraw the mind from the internal motion of the parts, by virtue of which each and every part of matter is, in turn, actually subdivided into different parts, something that plenitude [i.e., the fact that all place is occupied] does not prevent, The parts of matter don’t differ only modally if they are sprinkled with souls and entelechies, things which always exist. T noticed that somewhere in his letters Descartes also recognized inertia in ‘matter, on the example of Kepler." You deduce inertia from the force any given thing has for remaining in its state, something that doesn’t differ from its very nature, So you judge that the simple concept of extension suffices even for this phenomenon. But the very axiom concerning the preservation ofa state must be modified, since, for example, what moves in a curved path doesn’t preserve its curvedness, but only its direction. But even if there is a force in matter for preserving its state, that force certainly cannot in any way be derived from extension alone. I admit that each and every thing remains in its state until there isa reason for change; this is a principle of metaphysical necessity. But it is one thing to retain a state until something changes it, which even something intrinsically indifferent to both states does, and quite another thing, much more sighificant, for a thing not to be indifferent, but to have a force and, as it were, an inclination to retain its state, and so resist changing. And so once, when a youth, in a certain booklet I published, holding matter to be indifferent, in and of itself, to motion and rest, I inferred. from this that the largest body at rest ought to be moved by a colliding body, however small, without weakening the colliding body, and from this I inferred rules of motion abstracted from the system of things.”” Such a world, at any rate possible, in which matter at rest obeys that which pits. it in motion without any resistance [renisus] can indeed be imagined, but such a world would be merely chaos. And so, two things on which I always rely here, success in experience and the principle [ratio] of order, brought it about that T later came to see that God created matter in such a way that it contains a certain repugnance to motion, and, in a word, a certain resistance, by which a body opposes motion per se. And so, a body at rest resists every motion, and motion, indeed, resists greater motion, even in the same direction, so that it 228, Kepler held thet bodies in motion tend to come to rest, and the feature of bodies that causes this is what he called inertia, Descartes rejected this view; for him, bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, as he argued in Principles I 37—38, But he did grant that there isa sense in which bodies may be seid co have inertia, insofar as in collision, a body at rest must slow the moving body it sets into motion, See AT II 466-67, 543-44, 627. 229. See the discussion of this early view and its abandonment in the “Specimen of Dynamics” above, pp. 117-38, and inthe fragment on the nature of body and the laws of motion below, pp. 245-50,FROM THE LETTERS TO DE VOLDER 173 ‘weakens the force of the thing that impels it, Therefore, since matter resists motion per se by means of a general passive foree of resistance, but is put into motion through a special force of action, that is, through the special force of an entelechy, it follows that inertia also resists through the enduring motion of the entelechy, thatis, through a perpetual motive force. From this I showed’ (in the preceding letter) that a unified force is stronger, that is, that the force is twice as great if two degrees of speed are united in a one-pound body as it ‘would be if the two degrees of speed were dlivided between two one-pound bodies, and thus that the force of a one-pound body moving with two degrees ‘of velocity is twice as great as the force of two one-pound bodies moving with a single degree of velocity, since, although there is the same amount of velocity in both cases, in the one-pound body inertia hinders it only half as much, The inequality of forces between bodies of one and two pounds having velocities inversely proportional to their masses [moles] has been demonstrated in an- other way from our way of calculating forces, but it can also be elegantly derived from the consideration of inertia, so completely does everything harmonize. And so the resistance of matter contains two things, impenetrabil- ity or antitypy and resistance or inertia, and since they are everywhere equal in body or proportional to its extension, it is in these things that I locate the nature of the passive principle or matter. In just the same way I recognize a primitive entelechy in the active force exercising itself in various ways through motion and, ina word, something analogous to the soul, whose nature consists in a certain eternal law of the same series of changes, a series which it traverses unhindered, We cannot do without this active principle or ground of activity, for accidental or mutable active forces and motions themselves are certain modifications of a substantial thing, but forces and actions cannot be modifi- cations of a thing merely passive, such as matter is. Therefore, it follows that there is a first or substantial active thing modified by the added disposition [dispositio} of matter, or that which is passive. Asa result, secondary or motive forces and motion itself should be attributed to secondary matter, that is, to the complete body that results from the active and the passive. ‘And so, I come to the interaction between the soul, or any entelechy of an organic body, and the machine of organs. I am gratified that my hypothesis concerning this matter does not altogether displease you, a person of under~ standing and judgment. And indeed, you illustrate the point quite nicely, attributing to the soul an adequate idea of the corporeal machine; it is this, very thing that I intend when I say that the nature of the sou! is to represent the body. As a result, itis necessary that the soul represent to itself, in order, whatever follows from the laws of the body, some distinctly, others confusedly (namely those which involve a multitude of bodies); the former is to under- stand, the latter to sense. However, I think that we are in agreement that the soul is one thing, the idea of the body another. For the soul remains the same, while the idea of the body is constantly changing in accordance with the changes in body itself, whose present modifications it always displays. Of course, the idea of the present state of the body is always in the soul, but it is not simple, nor is it to any extent purely passive, but it is joined to a174 ‘Letpniz: Basic WorKs tendency [tendentia] to give rise to a new idea from a prior one, so that the soul is the source and ground of the different ideas of the same body, ideas that arise through a prescribed law. However, if you take the name ‘adequate idea’ in such a way that it signifies not that thing which is changed, but the persisting law of change itself, I do not oppose you. In that sense, I will say that the idea of body is in the soul, together with the phenomena which result from it. B. Leibniz to de Volder, I 20 Fune 1703 [excerpts] TURN FIRST to your earliest letter, in which you desire a necessary connection between matter (that is, resistance ) and active force, so that they will not be joined gratuitously. But the cause of the connection is the fact that every substance is active, and every finite substance is passive, and resistance is connected to passivity [pass]. The nature of things therefore requires such a connections nature cannot be so impoverished that it lacks a principle of action, and it doesn’t allow a vacuum in forms any more than it allows one in matter—not to mention (for now) the fact that action and unity have the same sources, I don’t entirely approve of the doctrine of attributes which they are formu- lating today, as if a single simple end absolute predicate (which they call an attribute) constitutes a substance, for I don’t find among notions any predi- ccates that are entirely absolute, predicates that don’t involve a connection with others. Certainly none are less so than those attributes, thought and extension, which they commonly put forward as examples, es I have often shown. Nor is a predicate the same as the-subject unléss it is considered ‘concretely; and so the mind coincides with that which is thinking (even if not by definition [formaliter]), but not with thought. For the subject must contain, beside present thoughts, future and past ones as well. ‘You believe that those who place the distinction among bodies principally in what they think of as the modes of extension (as almost everyone does today) by excluding the vacuum don’t disavow the view that bodies differ only modally. But two individual substances [substantiae singulares} should be distinguished more than modally. Futhermore, as things are commonly conceived, bodies can’t even be distinguished modally. For, if you take two bodies, A and B, equal and with the same shape and motion, it will follow from such a notion of body, namely one derived from the putative modes of extension alone, that they have nothing by which they can be distinguished intrinsically, Ts it therefore the case that A and B are not different individuals? Or js it possible that there are different things that cannot, in any way, be distinguished intrinsically? This and innumerable other things of this sort indicate that the true notions of things are completely turned on their heads by that new philosophy which forms substances from what is only material and passive, Things that differ ought to differ in some way, that is, have an intrinsic difference that can be designated; it is amazing that people have not,250 Lutpniz ON His CONTEMPORARIES extended or fills space, and motion is understood as change of space or place. But rather, over and above that which is deduced from extension and its variation or modification alone, we must add and recognize in bodies certain notions or forms that are immaterial, so to speak, or independent of extension, which you can call powers [potentia], by means of which speed is adjusted to magnitude, These powers consist not in motion, indeed, not in conatus or the beginning of motion, but in the cause or in that intrinsic reason for motion, which is the law required for continuing. And investigators have erred insofar as they considered motion, but not motive power or the reason for motion, which even if derived from God, author and governor of things, must not be understood as being in God himself, but must be understood as having been produced and conserved by him in things. From this we shall also show that it is not the same quantity of motion (which misleads many), but the same powers that are conserved in the world.