odor of flowers; he cannot hear sounds, he cannot see colors; he cannot feel electrical disturbances, etc. In a word, since he is a pure intelligence he can conceive only the purely intelligible; not that he is ignorant of any of the phenomena of nature, only that he knows them in their intelligible reasons and not through their sensible impressions, by means of which creatures are aware of them. Sensibility supposes a subject with senses, organs and nerves, that is, it is a relation between created things. From God's point of view, therefore, matter is not sensible; it is, as the Germans say, übersinnlich. The conclusion is easy to draw, namely, that God, being absolute intelligence, necessarily sees things as they are, and conversely the things in themselves are such as he sees them. Matter is, accordingly, such in itself as God sees it, but he sees it only in its ideal and intelligible essence; whence we see that matter is an intelligible something and not something sensible.
To be sure we may not conclude from this point that the essence of matter does not consist in extension, for it could be maintained that extension is an object of pure intelligence quite as well as force. But without taking up the difficulty of disengaging extension from every sensible element, I wish to establish only one thing, namely that Leibniz cannot [be reproached with idealizing matter, since this must be done in every system, at least in those which admit a divine logos and a foreordaining reason.
One of the most widely spread objections against the monadological system is the impossibilty of composing an extended whole out of non-extended elements. This is Euler's principal objection in one of his Letters to a German Princess and he considered it absolutely definitive because the necessary consequence of such a system would be to deny the reality of extension and of space, and to launch out thus into all the difficulties of the idealistic labyrinth. I think, however, that Euler's objection is not at all insoluble, and that it is even possible to separate the system of monads from the system of the ideality of space. It can be shown that all the questions relating to space can be adjourned or kept back without compromising the hypothesis of the monads.
For, let us suppose with the atomists, with Clarke and Newton, the reality of space, vacuums, and atoms. It is no
