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Full Idea
The active principle is not attributed by me to bare or primary matter, which is merely passive ...but to clothed or secondary matter which in addition contains a primitive entelechy, or active principle.
Clarification
An 'entelechy' makes potentialities become actual
Gist of Idea
Bare or primary matter is passive; it is clothed or secondary matter which contains action
Source
Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Wagner [1710], 1710 §2)
Book Ref
Leibniz,Gottfried: 'Leibniz Selections', ed/tr. Wiener,Philip P. [Scribners 1951], p.504
A Reaction
Secondary matter contains monads. The puzzling question is what primary matter consists of. It is not atoms, because it is infinitely divisible, and it seems to be composed of corpuscles. But what is it made of? Just gunge? He says it is 'flux'.
| 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] |