QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

in physics is a psychic concept. The fundamental indivisible units or elements of things out of
which Being consists are monads which exist beyond “a purely geometrical concept of matter”
and “purely geometric laws of motion. The monads do not have extension and thus they have to
be spiritual i.e. immaterial units. Everything that was material could be seen as phenomena
related to these spiritual realities which able to develop and understand their environment 309
As a mathematician and natural researcher, Leibniz did not doubt that nature’s physical
processes should take place in accordance with physical laws, but he wanted to link the new
doctrine of natural science to the traditional metaphysical system. For Leibniz, the world was –
more or less – our experiences, but at the level of phenomena, he considered it quite in order to
speak of bodies acting upon one another and of causal relationships. He agreed with most of the
ancient philosophers that ”Every spirit, every created simple substance is always united with a
body and no soul is ever entirely without one”. 310 Leibniz considered that every part of the world
was somehow connected to every other part and the coalesce of matter and spirit was possible,
since bodies were aggregates of monads and the mental laws governing the mind were clearly
differed from physical laws. Physics was adequate to represent deductive systems, such as
mechanics. It is able to tell what is happening, but not why it is happening. Physics is useful and
reliable, but it is also limited.
In his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz commented widely on the thoughts of the
English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). In his philosophy, Locke had attempted to chart
the nature of human understanding and mental laws by using scientific approach. He believed it
was possible to explain the capabilities and limits of reason by empirical method. 311 Leibniz
admitted that knowledge begins in experience but was critical of Locke’s concept that the soul is
a blank writing tablet on which nothing has yet been written – a tabula rasa – and that everything
inscribed there comes solely from the senses and from experience. As a rationalist, Leibniz
believed, like Plato and the Scholastics, that only reason was capable of establishing reliable
rules. Although the senses are necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, they are not capable of
providing all of it. Leibniz was critical of Locke for not being able to see that we have something
potential within us. We have reason and acquired dispositions of which we are not always
309
Jones 1969, 220-226. As a monad was not a body it must be a mind. Reasoning follows from the Cartesian
dualistic principle that everything that is not a body is mind
310
Aspelin 1995, 319, 324. Leibniz 1981, 58.
311
Ketonen 1998, 90-95.
118