Theodicy | Page 9

in consciousness it is a unity of 'idea'.
Very well: but we have not got far yet. For the old difficulty still
remains--it is purely arbitrary, after all, that a unitary consciousness
should be attached to, and represent, a mechanical collection of things
which happen to interact in a sort of pattern. If there is a consciousness

attached to human bodies, then why not to systems of clockwork? If the
body is represented as unity, it must surely be because it is unity, as the
old philosophy had held. But how can we reintroduce unity into the
body without reintroducing substantial form, and destroying the
mechanistical plurality which the new science demanded?
It is at this point that Leibniz produces the speculative postulate of his
system. Why not reverse the relation, and make the members represent
the mind as the mind represents the members? For then the unity of
person represented in the mind will become something actual in the
members also.
Representation appears to common sense to be a one-way sort of traffic.
If my mind represents my bodily members, something happens to my
mind, for it becomes a representation of such members in such a state;
but nothing happens to the members by their being so represented in
the mind. The [22] mental representation obeys the bodily facts; the
bodily facts do not obey the mental representation. It seems nonsense to
say that my members obey my mind because they are mirrored in it.
And yet my members do obey my mind, or at least common sense
supposes so. Sometimes my mind, instead of representing the state my
members are in, represents a state which it intends that they shall be in,
for example, that my hand should go through the motion of writing
these words. And my hand obeys; its action becomes the moving
diagram of my thought, my thought is represented or expressed in the
manual act. Here the relation of mind and members appears to be
reversed: instead of its representing them, they represent it. With this
representation it is the opposite of what it was with the other. By the
members' being represented in the mind, something happened to the
mind, and nothing to the members; by the mind's being represented in
the members something happens to the members and nothing to the
mind.
Why should not we take this seriously? Why not allow that there is
two-way traffic--by one relation the mind represents the members, by
another the members represent the mind? But then again, how can we
take it seriously? For representation, in the required sense, is a mental

act; brute matter can represent nothing, only mind can represent. And
the members are brute matter. But are they? How do we know that? By
brute matter we understand extended lumps of stuff, interacting with
one another mechanically, as do, for example, two cogs in a piece of
clockwork. But this is a large-scale view. The cogs are themselves
composed of interrelated parts and those parts of others, and so on ad
infinitum. Who knows what the ultimate constituents really are? The
'modern' philosophers, certainly, have proposed no hypothesis about
them which even looks like making sense. They have supposed that the
apparently inert lumps, the cogs, are composed of parts themselves
equally inert, and that by subdivision we shall still reach nothing but
the inert. But this supposition is in flat contradiction with what physical
theory demands. We have to allow the reality of force in physics. Now
the force which large-scale bodies display may easily be the
block-effect of activity in their minute real constituents. If not, where
does it come from? Let it be supposed, then, that these minute real
constituents are active because they are alive, because they are minds;
for indeed we have no notion of activity other than the perception we
have [23] of our own. We have no notion of it except as something
mental. On the hypothesis that the constituents of active body are also
mental, this limitation in our conception of activity need cause us
neither sorrow nor surprise.
The mind-units which make up body will not of course be developed
and fully conscious minds like yours or mine, and it is only for want of
a better word that we call them minds at all. They will be mere
unselfconscious representations of their physical environment, as it
might be seen from the physical point to which they belong by a human
mind paying no attention at all to its own seeing. How many of these
rudimentary 'minds' will there be in my body? As many as you like--as
many as it is possible there should be--say an infinite number and have
done with it.
We may now observe how this hypothesis introduces real formal unity