Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Philosophical Essays > Status Update

A substance is a being capable of action. It is simple or composite. A simple substance is that which has no parts. A composite substance is a collection of simple substances, or monads.

Leibniz om monaderna övertygar inte

are absolutely indifferent to motions and to shapes, and God has chosen from an infinity of possibles that which he judged most suitable.

A truth is necessary when its opposite implies a contradiction; and when it is not necessary, it is called contingent. That God exists, that all right angles are equal to one another, etc., are necessary truths, but that I exist and that there are bodies in nature that actually appear to have right angles are contingent truths. For the whole universe could have been made otherwise, since time, space, and matter are a

It can scarcely be doubted that God is pure act [purus actus], since he is most perfect. But imperfect things are passive, and if you conceive of them otherwise, you consider them only incompletely.

cannot be formed by the coming together of points were wrong, for z most part, to deny that substantial realities have first elements, as if z substantial realities had no primitive unities, or as if there were no simple substances. However, number & line are not chimerical things, even though there is no such composition, for they are relations that contain eternal truths, by which the phenomena of nature are ruled.

Those who make up a line from points have looked for the first elements in ideal things or relations, something completely contrary to what they should have done; and those who found that relations like number or space (which contain the order or relation of possible coexistent things)

Composition is only in concretes, that is, in masses whose relations are marked by these abstract lines. And it is in this way that mathematical points have their place; they are only modalities, that is, extremities. // It is the confusion of the ideal with the actual which has muddled everything and caused the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum.