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Full Idea
It must not be said that each portion of matter is animated, just as we do not say that a pond full of fishes is an animated body, although a fish is.
Gist of Idea
Not all of matter is animated, any more than a pond full of living fish is animated
Source
Gottfried Leibniz (Principle of Life and Plastic Natures [1705], p.190)
Book Ref
Leibniz,Gottfried: 'Leibniz Selections', ed/tr. Wiener,Philip P. [Scribners 1951], p.190
A Reaction
This is a particularly clear picture of the role of monads in matter. Monads are attached to bodies, which are entirely inanimate, but monads suffuse matter and give it its properties, like particularly bubbly champagne. Cf Idea 19422.
Related Idea
Idea 19422 Every particle of matter contains organic bodies [Leibniz]
| 13470 | Mass is central to matter [Newton, by Hart,WD] |
| 15978 | I take 'matter' to be a body, excluding its extension in space and its shape [Locke] |
| 12718 | Secondary matter is active and complete; primary matter is passive and incomplete [Leibniz] |
| 19416 | Not all of matter is animated, any more than a pond full of living fish is animated [Leibniz] |
| 19422 | Every particle of matter contains organic bodies [Leibniz] |
| 19436 | Bare or primary matter is passive; it is clothed or secondary matter which contains action [Leibniz] |
| 7560 | Leibniz struggled to reconcile bodies with a reality of purely soul-like entities [Jolley on Leibniz] |
| 6731 | No one can explain how matter affects mind, so matter is redundant in philosophy [Berkeley] |
| 14301 | We have no good concept of solidity or matter, because accounts of them are all circular [Hume] |
| 16603 | In the 17th C matter became body, and was then studied by science [Pasnau] |