Note 54 — Chapter II · THE SYSTEMATIC UNITY OF REALITY

This consideration obviously influenced Leibnitz. It is a much-decried doctrine in his system that every “monad,” or simple real thing, perceives nothing but its own internal states; there are no “windows” through which one monad can behold the states of another. It is easy to show that this doctrine leads to extremely far-fetched and fantastic hypotheses to account for the apparent communication between different monads, but not so easy to show that Pluralism can afford to dispense with it. See in particular Leibnitz’s New System of the Nature of Substances (Works, ed. Erdmann, 124 ff.; ed. Gerhardt, iv. 477 ff.; Eng. trans. in Latta’s Leibnis: the Monadology, etc., p. 297 ff.), especially §§ 13-17 and Monadology, §§ 7-9, 51.