Observations placeholder

from the Notes in Dreams of a Spirit Seer

Leibnitz says that this inner reason of all the external relations and changes of a substance is the power of conception, and later philosophers received this undeveloped thought with laughter.

But they would have done better if they had first considered whether a substance of the nature of a simple particle of matter is possible without any inner state. If then they would not have excluded such a state, it would have been incumbent upon them to think out another possible inner state than that of conceptions and the activities which depend upon them.

Everybody recognizes at once that, even if a power of obscure conceptions is conceded to the simple elementary parts of matter, it does not follow thence that matter itself possesses power of conception, because many substances of that kind, united into a whole, can yet never form a thinking unit.