of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real.

...to spare himself all further hypotheses for explaining the connection between the Ideal and the Real, and to settle the question by asserting that both are already completely identified within the monadsThe fundamental, indivisible building blocks of reality in Leibniz's philosophy; he viewed them as soul-like entities that do not physically interact. (which is why in our own day SchellingFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), a major figure in German Idealism., as the author of the Identity SystemThe philosophical position that mind and matter, or the subjective and objective, are two sides of the same absolute reality., has applied himself to this once again). Nevertheless, it did not please the famous philosophizing mathematician, polyhistor, and politician to use them for that purpose; instead, for this latter end, he specifically formulated Pre-established Harmonyoriginal: "harmonia praestabilita". Leibniz's theory that the soul and body do not affect each other, but were synchronized by God at the beginning of time like two perfect clocks.. This theory now presents us with two entirely distinct worlds, each incapable of acting upon the other in any way (see Principles of Philosophy § 84 and Examination of the Sentiments of Father Malebranche, page 500 ff. of the Works of Leibniz, published by Raspe), each the completely superfluous double of the other. Yet, these two must both exist at once, running exactly parallel to one another and keeping time to a hair’s breadth; therefore, the author of both, right at the beginning, established the most precise harmony between them, in which they now continue most beautifully alongside one another. Incidentally, this pre-established harmony could perhaps be made most comprehensible through a comparison with the stage, where very often physical influenceoriginal: "influxus physicus" – the idea of one thing actually causing a physical change in another. is only apparently present, because cause and effect are linked solely by means of a harmony pre-established by the director—for example, when one actor shoots and the other falls in time. Most crudely, and in brief, Leibniz presented the matter in its monstrous absurdity in sections 62 and 63 of his Theodicy. And yet, in this entire dogma, he does not even possess the merit of originality, since Spinoza? had already clearly enough set forth the pre-established harmony in the second part of his Ethics, specifically in the 6th and 7th propositions, along with their corollaries, and again in the fifth part, proposition 1—after he had, in the 5th proposition of the second part, expressed in his own way the very closely related doctrine of Malebranche, that "we see all things in God."*) Thus, Malebranche alone is the author of this—

) Spinoza's Ethics*, Part II, proposition 7: "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." — Part V, proposition 1: "Just as thoughts and ideas of things are linked together in the Mind, so the affections of the body, or images of things, are exactly ordered and linked together in the Body." — Part II, proposition 5: