in the best of clocks, but which is perfect in the works of God. And one can say that the soul is a most exact immaterial automaton. When it is said that a simple being will always act uniformly, a distinction needs to be made. If to act uniformly is to follow perpetually the same law of order or of succession, as in a certain scale or series of numbers, I agree that in this sense every simple being and even every composite being acts uniformly. But if uniformly means similarly, I do not agree The soul, though it is perfectly simple, has always a feeling composed of several perceptions at once; and this is as much to our
purpose as if it were composed of pieces, like a machine. For each preceding perception influences those which follow, according to a law which there is in perceptions as in motions.
C O M M E N T A R Y
The term entelechy is taken from Aristotle, who, as Leibniz understands him, uses it to designate the soul as principle of activity [eneigeia, process) toward the immensely fuller and more perfect realization of a being's self-in- corporated teleological end-state [telos). Leibniz uses entelechy to characterize the basic substance (monad) as an existing agent that functions appetitively to bring its own full nature to realization. He generally confines monad to the existing substances of this actual world (though other possible worlds will also comprise other possible substances, albeit in idea only). As Leibniz sees it, the term entelechy is ideally suited for possible substances because they all inter- nalize their own developmental principles in their appetitive "programs," these internal principles of change in accordance with their complete individual con- cepts.
Since matter is divisible in infinitum, every substance, however lowly, is dominant over an entourage of others. Each, accordingly, has a coordinated "body" of sorts for which it is the dominant "soul," an entelechy with a func- tion or telos of its own. All of nature is thus organic. Even those objects we deem inorganic, such as rocks, have cells in their crystalline substructure which renders them organic on the level of very small constitutive compo- nents. All of these "organic" substances embody principles of operation that exfoliate their development over time even as an acorn is pre-ordained to de- velop "automatically" into an oak tree. The individual monads themselves, which constitute bodies, are "incorporeal automata" striving to bring their own particular nature to increasingly fuller actualization. (On monads as automata compare sec. 64 below.) Unlike the autaikeia of the Stoics and Epicurus, which leads to stability or rest [ataiaxia], the suffisance of Leibniz is the dispositional basis for its appetition, the unfolding of a characteristic mode of activity.
Leibniz standardly contrasts the inner action of his organic automata (mo- nads) with the mechanical action under external prime movers represented by physical machinery, which must be understood on mechanical principles of efficient causality rather than organic principles of final (teleological) causality. KEY W O R D S :
simple substance/substance simple created monads/monades créées entelechy/ en téléchie
perfection/per/ecti'on self-sufficiency /suffisance internal action/action interne
incorporeal automata/automates incorporels
SECTION 19
19. If we are willing to call soul anything that has perceptions and appetites in the general sense I have just explained, then all simple substances or created monads could be called souls. But as sentience is something more than a mete perception, I hold that the generic name of monads or entelechies suffices for simple substances which have nothing but this <viz. mere perception>, and that one should call souls only those whose perception is more distinct and accompanied by memory.
19. Si nous voulons appeler Ame tout ce qui a perceptions et appetis dans
le sens general que je viens d'expliquer, toutes les substances simples ou Mo- nades créées pourroient être appelées Ames-, mais comme le sentiment est qu-
elque chose de plus qu'une simple perception, je consens que le nom general de Monades et d'Entelechies suffise aux substances simples qui n'auront que cela; et qu'on appelle Ames seulement celles dont la perception est plus dis- tincte et accompagnée de memoire.
(PNG, sec. 4.) Together with a particular body, each monad makes a living substance.... But when the monad has organs so adjusted that by means of them the impressions which are received, and consequently also the percep- tions which represent these impressions, are heightened and distinguished (as, for example, when rays of light are concentrated by means of the shape of the humors of the eye and act with greater force), then this may amount to senti-
ment, that is to say, to a perception accompanied by memory—a perception of
which there remains a kind of echo for a long time, which makes itself heard on occasion. Such a living being is called an animal, as its monad is called a
soul.
(NE, p. 54.) We become so accustomed to the motion of a mill or a waterfall, after living beside it for a while, that we pay no heed to it. Not that this motion ceases to strike on our sense-organs, or that something corresponding to it does not still occur in the soul because of the harmony between the soul and the body; but these impressions in the soul and the body, lacking the appeal of novelty, are not forceful enough to attract our attention and our memory, which are applied only to more compelling objects. Memory is needed for attention: when we are not alerted, so to speak, to pay heed to certain of our own present perceptions, we allow them to slip by unconsidered and even unnoticed. But if someone alerts us to them straight away, and makes us take note, for instance, of some noise which we have just heard, then we remember it and are aware of just having had some sense of it.
(DM, sec. 34.) The immortality which is required in morals and in religion does not consist merely in this perpetual existence, which pertains to all sub- stances, for if in addition there were no remembrance of what one had been,