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SAMUEL LEVEY

MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY IN


LEIBNIZ

(Received 20 November 1998)

Leibniz places the distinction between continuity and the structure


of matter alongside his theory of substance and his philosophy
of mathematics as one of the key elements required for finding
an escape from the difficulties of the second great “labyrinth,”
the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum. And nothing
informs his account of the whole fabric of nature so deeply as his
engagement with the second labyrinth. While in recent years our
understanding of this enshadowed end of his philosophy has been
improving, still, it seems to me that our grasp of Leibniz’s thought
about continuity remains highly imperfect. And so too it seems to
me that we remain very much in the dark about his account of the
structure of matter. For Leibniz articulates the second in terms of
its contrasts with the first: his analysis of matter is very much set
out in counterpoint to his analysis of continuity. In this paper I shall
inquire into Leibniz’s metaphysical account of reality by looking
more closely at the concept of continuity and its influence on his
theory of matter.
Some fresh critical perspective is to be gained, I believe, by
examining Leibniz’s thought about matter and continuity in some
of his earliest writings, in particular those of the early 1670s, a
period in which his views about matter and continuity are still in
turmoil and yet also a period in which those views essentially come
to rest. So it is an aim of my project here to uncover some of the
early development of Leibniz’s philosophy and to trace out some of
its connections to his later thought. About the philosophy itself, I
intend to show that in those early writings Leibniz’s thought is, in a
subtle way, quite deeply divided between two different conceptions
of continuity: one based in the idea of potentiality, and the other a

Philosophical Studies 94: 81–118, 1999.


© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
82 SAMUEL LEVEY

sort of forerunner to the topological concept of connectedness. Each


of those two concepts of continuity leaves its mark on his emerging
theory of matter, and I think with both of them in mind we shall be
able to achieve a much clearer view of his account of the structure of
matter – and a clearer view also of some of the profound difficulties
facing it. By no means do I intend my remark in this paper to offer a
full reckoning of Leibniz’s theories of matter and continuity.1 But I
do hope to throw some new light on the subject, and to follow some
leads that point in a rather new direction.

MATTER AND CONTINUITY IN 1669 (AND IN 1676 AND 1705)

1.1 Hylomorphism and Continuity: “Unbounded” Matter


As early as 1669 several of the main strands of Leibniz’s thought
about continuity, and about matter, are already visible in his writ-
ings. At this point in time, Leibniz sponsors a “hylomorphic”
analysis of material bodies as compounds of form and matter, an
analysis that hooks up directly with the contrast between the discrete
and the continuous. In the background here is an early project to
reconcile the Cartesian and Aristotelian paradigms concerning the
natural world; Leibniz aims to conjoin the two traditions by show-
ing that “Aristotle’s theories of matter, form, and change can be
explained by magnitude, figure and motion” (A VI,2,434).
In a 1669 letter to Jacob Thomasius, Leibniz writes that “primary
matter” – that is, matter taken abstractly as an undifferentiated
extensum – is a continuous quantity. Although it is extended in
space,
it is unbounded [interminatam] . . . ôr indefinite, for so long as it is continuous, it
is not cut into parts and therefore boundaries [termini] are not actually assigned
in it. (To Thomasius, 1669. A VI,2,435)2

In calling primary matter “unbounded”, Leibniz has especially in


mind the idea that it lacks interior boundaries; that’s why the lack
of boundaries is relevant to primary matter’s not being cut into parts.
The properties that Leibniz ascribes to continuous primary matter
– namely, being “indefinite” and “unbounded” in the sense of
lacking “actually assigned” interior boundaries – are in fact the
key elements in this earliest analysis of continuity. A continuous
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 83

quantity is one without any articulated inner structure; it lacks the


definiteness or determinacy that would come along with an assign-
ment of parts and boundaries. It is indifferently divisible into parts
in any number of ways, but is not actually divided.

1.2 Hylomorphism and Discreteness: Form, Bounded Matter and


the Contiguum
The early account of discreteness which is the counterpart to that
analysis of continuity invokes the other side of Leibniz’s hylo-
morphism: form is to fill in the ontological detail of “unbounded”
matter and cut it into discrete bodies precisely by introducing actu-
ally assigned boundaries and parts. Here the program of rewriting
Aristotle in Cartesian terms is particularly salient. “Form,” Leibniz
says, “is nothing but figure [figuram],” and “figure is the boundary of
a body” (A VI,2,435). Hence for primary matter to be compounded
with form is nothing more than for boundaries to be assigned in it,
marking off distinct bodies. And Leibniz holds that with the assign-
ment of boundaries, the continuity of (primary) matter is broken,
for
in order to have a variety of boundaries arising in matter a discontinuity of the
parts is necessary. (A VI,2,435)

Thus secondary matter – matter taken concretely as invested with


figures – is not continuous but discrete; its parts are strictly discon-
tinuous.
It’s important to note that the discontinuity of the various parts of
matter that is introduced by form is not maintained by the presence
of intervening voids or loci vacui between neighboring parts. The
1669 letter to Thomasius interestingly reveals a young Leibniz not
yet the steady advocate he is soon to become of the “plenum hypo-
thesis” (i.e. the claim that there are no absolutely empty spaces or
vacua in nature but rather that everything is “full” or a plenum of
matter), for in it he writes, “to me it seems that neither a vacuum or
a plenum is necessary; the nature of things can be explained in either
way” (A VI,2,434).3 Still, at this early date the plenum hypothesis
already looms large in his thought, and his account of the discon-
tinuity of matter is precisely crafted, in the following way, to fit the
plenum view of nature.4 Discontinuity in matter does not involve
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the existence of voids but arises instead due to the fact that at the
locus of a discontinuity between neighboring bodies, those bodies
are moving with different motions while still remaining in contact.
“This happens,” he says,
when the parts stay together [immediata] but are moved in different directions.
For example, two spheres, one included in the other, can be moved in different
directions and yet remain contiguous, though they cease to be continuous. (1669.
A VI,2,435–6)

Contiguity really is supposed to preserve the integrity of the


plenum because immediately neighboring bodies will touch in the
strong sense that there is no empty space at all between them. As
Leibniz will announce explicitly when he sets down a definition of
contiguity a few years later:
Contiguous things are those between which there is no distance. (“On the
Cohesiveness of Bodies.” 1672. A VI,3,94)

A last key point about continuity and discreteness also emerges in


the 1669 Thomasius letter. Leibniz holds that discrete ôr secondary
matter is in fact torn into separate parts each of which has its own
boundaries:
For by the very fact that the parts are discontinuous, each will have its own
separate boundaries [terminos] (for Aristotle defines continuous things as hôn ta
eschata hen [i.e. those whose boundaries are one]). (1669. A VI,2,435).5

The thought here is presumably that discontinuous things, by


contrast with continuous ones, are those whose boundaries are two.
On this account, then, pairs of boundaries always arise at the locus
of a discontinuity between any two adjacent parts of (secondary)
matter. That fact will come to be quite important later on in our
analysis; but for the present I’ll just raise it to your attention.
The metaphysical views so far recovered from this early writ-
ing stake out accounts of the structure of matter and the nature
of continuity that set the two in sharp contrast. Continuity is a
kind of structural indeterminacy: a continuous quantity would be
something interminatum, “unbounded,” lacking an assignment of
interior boundaries or parts. Matter, on the other hand, is something
“bounded.” It’s a fully determinate, discrete quantity actually faulted
throughout with interior boundaries, and the material world is a
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 85

plenum of secondary matter that constitutes not a true continuum but


rather a contiguum, so to speak, of discontinuous parts, all marked
out by their various individual motions.6

1.3 Cohesion as Motus Conspirans


Although I only mean here to sketch the barest outlines of Leibniz’s
very early thought about matter and continuity, there is a detail I
have been withholding and must now pause to introduce. It is the
topic of cohesion – the old issue about how particular pieces of
matter manage to hold intact rather than dispersing or dissolving
into the surrounding environment, and a well-known can of worms
that I wish to open only as slightly as possible. But as we shall see
shortly, in Leibniz’s thinking the concept of cohesion is somewhat
entangled with issues concerning continuity, and so I shall need to
make a few remarks about it.
Probably the most important single fact about Leibniz’s early
views on the topic of cohesion is that they are shaped around
the intensely Cartesian thought that matter is unified into cohesive
bodies by motion (cf. A VI,3,80, VE 2041). Adjacent parcels of
matter form a cohesive whole in virtue of sharing a common motion
– what Leibniz sometimes calls motus generalis (A VI,3,42) or
motus communis (VE 2047), or sometimes, most sweetly, motus
conspirans (cf. VE 492, 495). But this common motion is consistent
with each parcel of matter inside the whole having a motion of its
own that divides and distinguishes it from the others. And likewise
there can be further differing motions within each parcel which
distinguish its parts, and so on, as far as you please. The operative
ideas in Descartes are visible in Principles of Philosophy, II, 25:
By a ‘body’ or a ‘part of matter’ I understand everything that is transferred
together, even though this may consist of many parts which have different motions
relative to one another. (Principles, II,25. AT VIII,53–4)

This idea about motion and matter – the “Cartesian motion thesis”
that bodies are individuated by motion – crystallizes nicely in
Leibniz’s account of cohesion as, for example, when a few years
after the Thomasius letter he writes:
Heterogeneous ôr agitating [turbans] matter is bound into one !body" by a motus
generalis. (PQP, 1672. A VI,3,42)7,8
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Thus the binding of matter into cohesive bodies and the dividing
of it into distinct parts emerge as two sides of the same coin:
cohesion and division are the opposing faces of motion in the
material plenum. One face is harmony, and the other, disorder.9
Let me sum up a few conclusions about Leibniz’s views of matter
and continuity circa 1669. Continuity is taken to be a form of
indefiniteness and is characterized specifically as unboundedness
– the lack of actually assigned interior termini or boundaries, and
hence the lack of actually assigned parts. Matter, by contrast, is
discrete, determinate, fully invested with shapes and interior bound-
aries, and it is made so by motion. The differing motions within
the plenum of matter assign a variety of boundaries in it, cutting it
into an infinite mosaic of discontinuous parts, each enclosed within
its own separate outer boundaries. Neighboring parts that share a
common motion form cohesive bodies, though such bodies are still
strictly divided into smaller discontinuous parts by further internal
motions; and all the parts of matter in the universe are so packed
together that the boundaries of contiguous parts are “indistant” from
one another, leaving no empty spaces anywhere.

1.4 Continuity as Potentiality and Leibniz’s Later Metaphysics,


c. 1705
As I said before, being “indefinite” and lacking “actually assigned”
parts and boundaries are the key elements in the 1669 analysis of
continuity, and being actually divided into parts in a definite way
is characteristic of matter. To fans of the later Leibniz those terms
should strike some familiar notes as well, for they are also key
elements in his most considered analyses of the structure of matter
and the structure of continuity that he articulates in various contexts
around the turn of the century, notably in his “Note on Foucher’s
Objection,” in his reply to Bayle’s Rorarius, in the letters to de
Volder, and in the letters to Sophie.10
I won’t give a full rehearsal of Leibniz’s account of continuity
and matter from the later writings here, but it will be useful to have
a few of its details in mind. For I want to bring out a point about
his view of continuity that is fairly clear in those later writings on
the continuum but which occurs rather more subtly in our piece
from 1669. The concept at work in Leibniz’s account of continuity
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 87

is in fact an Aristotelian one much despised by Descartes and his


followers: it is the concept (or perhaps a concept) of potentiality. In
a passage from a 1702 text attacking the Cartesian physics, Leibniz
distinguishes the discrete from the continuous this way:
Every repetition (ôr multitude of similar things [eorundem]) is either discrete, as
in numbered things where the parts of the aggregate are distinguished, or continu-
ous, where the parts are indeterminate and can be obtained [possunt assumi] in an
infinity of ways [infinitis modis]. (G IV,394)

A continuous repetition or multitude has only “indeterminate parts,”


and Leibniz’s gloss on that phrase is his usual one: a continuous
whole has no determinate assignment of parts actually made within
it but is rather merely indifferently assignable or divisible into parts
in any of an infinity of different ways. In a very late writing this
view is still readily visible:
In the ideal or continuous the whole is prior to the parts, as the arithmetical unit
is prior to the fractions that divide it, which can be assigned arbitrarily, the parts
being only potential [le parties ne sont que potentielles]. (1714. G III,622)

The example in this passage of a continuous whole with indeter-


minate parts is a favorite of Leibniz’s for clarifying his account,
and a compelling one too, for the “arithmetical unit” can indeed
be understood as the sum of (and thus as “dividing into”) any of
an infinity of different series of fractions that can be extracted from
it. For instance, the “unit” or number 1 can be taken as the sum
1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4, or with equal justice as the sum 2/3 + 2/9
+ 2/27 + 2/81 + &c. ad infinitum, or perhaps instead as the sum
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + &c. ad infinitum. Obviously there is no
end to such possible assignments of “parts” to the arithmetical unit,
and Leibniz’s suggestion is that to identify any one of those assign-
ments as the way the arithmetical unit falls into parts would be
arbitrary, and conceptually misleading. For the unit is not invested
with any determinate substructure of actual parts at all, but rather –
and in the last passage the reference to the concept of potentiality
is unmistakable on the surface of his text – “the parts are only
potential.”
Such explicit reference to potentiality or potential parts is not
what one usually finds in his texts, however, and even in the later
writings about continuity where there is far less concern to forge
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an alliance between Aristotle and Descartes, the concept of poten-


tiality most often is not mentioned outright but rather only lies
implicit in the discussion, as Leibniz’s account of continuous quant-
ity is instead delivered in terms of parts that are “indefinite” or
“indeterminate” or “ideal” or “possible.”
[I]t is the same for the line, in which the whole is prior to the part because the part
is only possible and ideal. (1695. G IV,491f.)
Indeed, a mathematical line is like the arithmetical unit: for both, the parts are
only possible and completely indefinite. (1704. G II,268)

If in Leibniz’s usual statements of his view the concept of potenti-


ality is dressed in the language of indeterminacy, of “possible and
indefinite parts,” the contrast between the structure of matter and the
structure of a continuous quantity nonetheless remains fully exposed
and set out in terms of “actually assigned” parts and divisions in
matter:
But in real things, namely, in bodies, the parts are not indefinite (as they are in
space, a mental thing [re mentali]), but are actually assigned a certain way as
nature has actually instituted divisions and subdivisions in accordance with the
varieties of motion. (1704. G II,268)

Thus one finds in these later writings that the main elements of his
view of matter and continuity that were first outlined in 1669 still
command the center of Leibniz’s account circa 1704–1705. That
later account trades on the idea that continuity is a form of indeter-
minacy, a concept he repeatedly calls by name. He writes to Sophie
in 1705 that in matter “nothing has remained indeterminate, whereas
indeterminacy is the essence of continuity” (G VII,563). And the
ancient notion being unlimbered in that analysis of continuity, but
mainly not being called upon by name, is the concept of potentiality.
Looking back from this perspective at the very early hylomorphic
account of physical bodies, we can readily find marks of the
role being played by the “indeterminist” or “potentialist” view of
continuity: for example, recall how Leibniz writes to Thomasius that
continuous matter is unbounded “ôr indefinite” [seu indefinitam]
(A VI,2,435). The terms primarily in play in the early discus-
sions of continuity, however, are “part,” “motion” and “boundary”
– ones, we might note, with impeccable Cartesian credentials. Yet
Leibniz still manages to capture a notion of potentiality in those
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 89

terms simply by denying that they apply to continuous quantity.


To be continuous is thus precisely to lack an actual assignment of
parts and boundaries; and for a concrete quantity to be continuous
would be for it to lack a variety of differing internal motions, for
it to be totally at rest through and through. Hence in this respect
too the early writing are precursors of the later ones: when in
1669 Leibniz describes continuous primary matter as “indefinite” or
“unbounded,” underlying his description is the concept of poten-
tiality with its metaphysical and distinctly Aristotelian pedigree.

1.5 Matter and Continuity in the 1676 Metaphysics


To this point I have been tracing out connections between
Leibniz’s earliest thoughts about matter and continuity and his most
considered later views about them (c. 1705), trying to show that the
same basic elements are in play in his thought at both ends of his
philosophical career. It is going to be important to note as well that
those elements are also the key players in his most considered early
views about matter and continuity – not exactly the views of 1669
(that are to be challenged severely) but rather those of 1676, which
find their best and most fully articulated expression in the dialogue
Pacidius Philalethi . A proper study of those 1676 views will have
to await another occasion, but a look at a few telling passages should
be enough to raise the salience those core elements of Leibniz’s
views on matter and continuity that we have observed already in
the earlier and later writings.
For example, unmistakably occurring in the 1676 texts is the
trademark thought about the internal structure of matter and its link
to motion:
Matter is a discrete being [ens discretum], not a continuous one; it is only
contiguous, and is united by motion. (“On the Secrets of the Sublime,” 1676.
A VI,3,474).

Evident also is the potentialist view of continuous quantity, which


surfaces in the following passage, as Leibniz – in the voice of the
character Charinus – sums up a long discussion of whether the
continuum could be composed of points:
We have concluded that the continuum can neither be dissolved into points nor
composed of them, and that there is no fixed and determinate [certum ac deter-
90 SAMUEL LEVEY

minatum] number (either finite or infinite) of points assignable in it. (1676. A


VI,3,555)

The claim here that points are not determinately assigned in a


continuum fills out a view about the parts of a continuum and
the “extrema” or boundaries of those parts (i.e. points, lines and
phrases) that is detailed a few pages earlier in the dialogue. Again
Charinus is speaking:
[T]here are no points before they are designated. If a sphere touches a plane, the
locus of contact is a point; if a body is intersected by another body, or a surface
by another surface, then the locus of intersection is a surface or a line, respec-
tively. But there are no points, lines or surfaces anywhere else, and in general [in
universum] there are no extremes except those that are made by a dividing [fiunt
dividendo]: nor are there any parts in the continuum before they are produced by
a division [divisione]. But not all the divisions that can be made are ever made.
(A VI,3,552–3)

Leibniz’s view in this passage is what we might by now expect. A


continuum is divisible but is not in its own right actually divided into
parts and boundaries; rather, it is only by divisions being made into
the continuum that points or other “extrema” come to be assigned
in it. As he will often note, points, lines and planes are not parts of
a continuum at all but are mere “modes” of it: they are the vertices,
edges and surfaces of extensa (cf. A VI,3,555, VE 2040, C 523, A
VI,6,152, G II,520). But the view Leibniz offers here is not simply
about what particular ontological status points, lines and planes are
to have, whether that of part of mode. It is about the conditions
under which points, lines or planes exist at all in a continuum: they
exist not prior to but only dependently upon an actual division of
the continuum into parts. And with that view of the structure of the
continuum firmly in hand, later on in the dialogue Leibniz is able to
respond to an objection that presupposes points to exist even in an
undivided continuum with the following riposte:
When the matter is adequately weighed, it seems to me that – as I also said with
your approval on another occasion above – these points of yours do not pre-exist
before an actual division, but are brought about by division. (1676. A VI,3,562)

The 1676 metaphysics of matter and continuity evidently engages


much the same conceptual machinery that we find at work both in
the early writings of 1669 and in the later ones of 1705 as well. As
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 91

we shall soon see, however, the transition from the earliest account
to his account of 1676 is interrupted by fairly dramatic changes
of mind. But before turning to consider what happens in Leibniz’s
thought during that turbulent interval between 1669 and 1676, I want
to look one last time to the 1705 account of matter and continuity
and draw out a few more of its relations to those earlier accounts.

1.6 From 1669 to 1705: New Elements in Leibniz’s Later Views,


and the Priority Thesis
Leibniz’s views develop over the fifty years of his philosophical
career, and I should not want to imply that his final thoughts on
these topics simply emerge fully formed in their initial appearance
in his writings. On several important points the 1705 metaphysics
of matter is not already mapped out in the 1669 writings, and most
notable among the developments, of course, is the famous doctrine
of the monads: the thesis that the only true substances are indi-
visible, immaterial mind-like units whose properties are various
perceptual states and states of “force.” But even quite apart from
the theory of substance, Leibniz’s 1705 views on motion, matter
and the continuum have evolved significantly from the ancestors of
them that we find in 1669. Just for example, three elements of the
1705 account that set it apart from the views formulated in 1669
are: (1) the modalized spin on continuity, according to which the
continuity of continuous magnitudes is due to the fact that they
encode or “express” possibilities (cf. G II,268–9, 276, 278–9, 282,
IV,568, VII,562–3); (2) the denial of the Cartesian motion thesis that
motion is (or even could be) what individuates bodies in a plenum,
which Leibniz famously and powerfully registers in Article 13 of
De Ipsa Natura (1698); and (3) what I have elsewhere called the
“mereological priority thesis” and shall say more about in a moment
below.11 None of these three facets of Leibniz’s later thought is
present in the 1669 account; and the first two are ideas that really
come into being only starting around 1680 or well later. But the last
of the three that I mentioned is making itself apparent already by
1676, and few remarks about it are in order.
It is an important strand of Leibniz’s later thought about con-
tinuity that continuous wholes are “prior” to their parts, by which he
has in mind ontological rather than, say, temporal priority; and this
92 SAMUEL LEVEY

strand was entirely visible to us once already in a passage from 1704


quoted earlier, where he writes, “In the ideal or continuous the whole
is prior to the parts” (G III,622). This thesis about continuous wholes
and their parts forms one half of a staple feature of his account of
the distinction between the discrete and the continuous, namely, the
mereological priority thesis that in a continuous quantity the whole
is prior to the parts, whereas in a discrete one, such as matter, the
parts are prior to the whole.
In matter and in actual realities the whole is a result of the parts; but in ideas or in
possibles . . . the indeterminate whole is prior to the divisions. (1705. G VII,562)

The contrast between the continuous and the discrete laid out in
the priority thesis ties neatly together with Leibniz’s distinction
between indeterminate quantities, whose parts are only potential,
and determinate ones, whose parts are actually assigned.
The continuum, that is, involves indeterminate parts, whereas in actuals there
is nothing indefinite – indeed, in them any division that can be made, is made.
Actuals are composed as a number is composed out of unities [e.g., 6 = 1 + 1 +
1 + 1 + 1 + 1], ideals as a number out of fractions: the parts are actual in the real
whole, not in the ideal whole. (1706. G II,282)

Indeed as he tells us at G IV,492 – also quoted above – the continu-


ous whole is prior to its parts “because the part is only possible and
ideal.”
The priority thesis becomes something of a slogan in the later
writings for Leibniz’s complex analysis of the source in our reason-
ing of the paradoxes concerning the composition of the continuum,
and one might be tempted to consider it the distinctive stamp of his
later views about matter and continuity. It is therefore worth keeping
in mind that the priority thesis has in fact made its way into his
writings already by 1676, where he tells us straight out in one place
that “in the continuum, the whole is prior to its parts” (A VI,3,502),
and, in another, that in “discrete things” – his example is “number,”
presumably conceived as an aggregate composed out of unities –
“the whole is not prior to the parts, but the converse” (A VI,3,520).
At this point our running chronicle of Leibniz’s views about
matter and continuity as they appear in three distinct periods of his
thought should be complete enough to show that a striking unity of
mind presides over his account in each of those three periods, as he
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 93

hammers out successively refined versions of a single theory whose


basic contents were first advanced in 1669. Given that unity of mind,
one might naturally come to suspect that there is also a constancy to
his opinions on these topics as well, one that holds the same theory
intact throughout the course of four decades; but in fact Leibniz will
defy expectations of that sort, as we are about to see. All I mean to
do here is to put the separate writings of 1669, 1676, and 1705 all
on a line and say that they express essentially the same core view: a
single deep current of thought about matter and continuity and the
distinction between them.
And now the plot thickens.

2. COHESION, TOPOLOGY AND TWO CONCEPTS OF


CONTINUITY

2.1 What Leibniz Adds to Descartes’ Theory of Cohesion, c. 1671


While the history of Leibniz’s analysis of matter and continuity
begins and ends with essentially the same account in ascendance,
a defining piece of action occurs near the outset of those early years
that involves a rather different set of ideas and puts Leibniz’s whole
view of the structure of matter in a different light. At the center of
the action is the topic of cohesion.
Let’s consider another passage from Propositione Quaedem
Physicae (1672), where the Cartesian ideas about motion and
cohesion are particularly apparent, but in which hints of something
else in Leibniz’s account of cohesion begin to surface:
It is manifest that some body is constituted as definite, one, particular, distinct
from others, by some motion of its own, or a particular endeavor [conatus], and
if it is lacking this it will not be some separate body, but that by whose motion
alone one continuous body coherent with it is moved. And this is what I have
said elsewhere, that cohesion comes from endeavor or motion, that those things
which move with one motion be understood to cohere with one another. (1672. A
VI,3,28)

Besides the obvious links to the Cartesian views about how varying
motions divide matter into separate parts while common motions
bind it into cohesive bodies, two features of this passage are espe-
cially noteworthy. First, observe how Leibniz allows his claims
94 SAMUEL LEVEY

about cohesion to flow over into claims about continuity. Taken at


face value, the suggestion here seems to be that parcels of matter
moving with one motion will be not only cohesive but also continu-
ous; and while that claim seems to stand in outright contradiction
to his 1669 account of matter as a strictly discrete quantity, it’s no
fluke. Leibniz really is claiming that cohesive matter is continu-
ous, and we shall find him saying so time and again in the years
between 1669 and 1676. Secondly, note the role being played here
by the term conatus or “endeavor.” While in this sort of context
that term could be intended to convey nothing more than the idea
of an individual motion, we shall see below that in fact it signals the
presence of something extra in Leibniz’s account, something that
is not merely a feature of the Cartesian view.12 The bottom line is
that on Leibniz’s c. 1671 view of cohesion, it’s more than just motus
conspirans, it’s a common motion plus conatus ôr endeavor. And
that difference turns out to have metaphysical implications.
The passage at A VI,3,28 just quoted above comes directly from
Leibniz’s early physics of motion, and mixed into that physics is an
ontology of conati or infinitesimal elements of motion – infinitely
small “strivings” scattered throughout the material plenum that are
supposed to be the very beginnings of true motions (cf. A VI,3,79–
80, 95–96). This early conatus physics is somewhat fleeting; it
doesn’t survive past the end of March, 1676 – if indeed, it lasts
even that long. Without going into the details, once Leibniz comes
to reject the possibility of an infinitesimal quantity, which he does
sometime in March of 1676, the early conatus physics simply falls
through.13
Still, the early conatus physics proves very illuminating, for it
carries a point of special importance concerning Leibniz’s under-
standing of the topic of continuity. During a brief period while
the conatus physics is in force, Leibniz seems totally to reverse
his view of the relationship between the concept of continuity
and the idea of an actual assignment of parts. Sometime in 1670,
and for a few years after that, he comes to hold that continuous
things can have actually assigned parts; and then just as abruptly he
reverts back to his original view that an actual assignment of parts
requires discontinuity. In that small episode I think it’s possible to
discern that Leibniz runs together two different concepts under the
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 95

single heading of ‘continuity’. Some stage-setting will be needed


in order to bring these two concepts and my point about them into
sufficiently high relief.

2.2 Continuity and Topology


Early on especially, but fairly well across his writings, questions
concerning cohesion and division are for Leibniz intimately bound
up with questions about continuity. Indeed, the labyrinth of the
continuum he frequently mentions is conceived to embrace a host
of physical as well as mathematical concerns. As the seventh item
cited in his prospectus for an encyclopaedic project to be entitled.
De Rerum Arcanis (“On the Secrets of Things”), Leibniz lists:
Labyrinthus posterior, ôr on the Composition of the continuum, on time, place,
motion, atoms, the indivisible and the infinite. (1676. A VI,3,527)

Cohesion does not appear explicitly on the list, but it is certainly


lurking in the background as he cites “motion” and “atoms.”
To set as the subject for a single line of inquiry that sort of
amalgam of topics is typical of early modern (and classical)
studies in “natural philosophy.” By contrast, the study of continuity
today falls under the jurisdiction of topology, which is essentially
concerned with the structure and properties of various abstract
spaces and only incidentally, if at all, with the structure of concrete
physical magnitudes and phenomena. But a number of what one
might call “proto-topological” ideas do crop up in natural philo-
sophy, ideas that also provide the intuitive underlay for the founda-
tions of contemporary topology. Perhaps the most important of
these is the idea of a “natural whole” that has no “natural joints”
or “seams.” And this idea lies at the bottom of the concept of
connectedness – a concept that is a key feature of all standard
definitions of a “continuum” in classical contemporary point-set
topology.14 Using the framework of point-set topology, I shall set
out a few basic topological ideas to help us get quite clear on the
concept of connectedness, and then show how that concept ties
together with Leibniz’s c. 1671 account of cohesion.15
The abstract spaces topology investigates are, on the standard
conception, represents as sets of arbitrary elements we can call
“points,” and thus the sets are called “point sets.” Although general
96 SAMUEL LEVEY

Figure 1.

topology can be constructed in a number of ways taking different


concepts as elementary, the basic concept most often used to do
so is that of an open set, and my brief sketch will observe this
convention.16 To a point set or space S there belongs a select family
of subsets that govern its topological structure: these are its open
sets. A few simple axioms decide which subsets of S can be its open
sets. Basically they tell us that the family of open sets is closed under
the set-theoretical operations of arbitrary union and finite intersec-
tion, and that the whole space itself and the empty set both count as
open sets.17
In its strict and perfectly general form delimited by those
axioms, however, the concept open set doesn’t automatically yield a
comfortable heuristic for thinking about topological properties like
connectedness. Since the range of point spaces is extremely diverse,
the axioms for open sets cover an unimaginably rich spectrum of
cases, and there is no way to “visualize” (or otherwise present easily
to the mind) what it is, in general, for a subset of a space to be an
open set. But it is not hard to get something of a grip on the idea
of an open set if we restrict our attention to more familiar, more
easily visualized spaces and consider a paradigm case. Imagine a
two-dimensional Euclidean space, like a flat plane, with a circle
inscribed in it (See Figure 1).18
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 97

Figure 2.

The circle defines three families of points in the plane. First, there
are the points that lie on the circle itself. Second, there are those
falling strictly within the disk-shaped region enclosed by the circle
(but not actually lying on the circle). And third there are those points
falling strictly outside of the circle. Now, our paradigm case of an
open set is given by the second family of points: the set of those
points falling strictly within the circle. Those points make up an
open disk in the plane, a disk minus the boundary circle that encloses
it. The open disk is the paradigm open set for a two dimensional
space. For a three dimensional space, the paradigm open set will
be an open sphere – a sphere minus its boundary surface. In a one
dimensional space, the paradigm will be an open linear interval, a
finite line segment minus its two end-points.
In contrast to this, the disk plus its boundary circle is the
paradigm case of a closed set (and likewise the closed sphere and
the closed linear interval are paradigms for their spaces).
Let’s sometimes be willing to ignore the fine distinction between
open and closed sets, and in those times just speak of our disk as
D (see Figure 2). But when we need to be careful about it, we shall
distinguish the open disk enclosed by the circle, D-minus (for “disk
minus the circle”), from the closed disk made up of all the interior
points plus the boundary circle, D-plus. And we shall distinguish the
space containing all and only those points that lie strictly outside the
circle as the exterior.
With the idea of an open set in hand, we can now use it to define
an array of other topological concepts, most importantly the concept
of a limit point of a region of a given space. We identify a region with
98 SAMUEL LEVEY

a subset R of the points in S, and a limit point is defined as follows: a


point p that is an element of the space S is a limit point of a subset R
of that space if and only if every open set containing p also contains
at least one other point p∗ distinct from p (p∗ $ = p) such that p∗ is an
element of R.19
Applying this definition to our example of the circle in the plane,
we get the following results. For any point p lying strictly outside the
circle, in the exterior space, there is always an open disk, containing
p, small enough not to spill over onto the circle or into the interior
space of the disk it encloses. Thus, it is not true that in every open set
containing a point p in the exterior, there is a distinct point p∗ that
belongs to the open disk D-minus – nor is that true even of the closed
disk D-plus. Therefore, no point lying strictly outside of the circle,
in the exterior space, is a limit point of our open disk D-minus. Nor
is any such point in the exterior space a limit point of the closed disk
D-plus.
But, for any point p lying on the circle itself, it is true that every
open disk that contains p will always spill over into the open disk
D-minus and thus contain some further point p∗ distinct from p, such
that p∗ is an element of D-minus. And so we see that every point on
the circle is indeed a limit point of the open disk, D-minus. Likewise,
every point on the circle is also a limit point of the closed disk, D-
plus. Notice too that every point on the circle is a limit point of the
exterior space.
Now, finally, with the concept of a limit point in hand, we can
easily define connectedness and head back towards the concept of
continuity. A set such as our space S or any subset of it is connected
if and only if it admits of no separation – that is, if and only if it
cannot be partitioned into two nonempty, disjoint subsets neither
of which contains any limit points of the other.20 Intuitively put,
any way of dividing a connected space into two discrete parts will
always “chop” or “tear” some limit points off one of those parts and
deposit them in other.
Suppose we were to take an infinitely sharp Exacto knife and try
to cut the disk D out of the plane. However carefully and smoothly
we cut, we shall face the decision of what to do with those points
lying on the circle itself. If we cut into the plane in such a way that
leaves the circle attached to the disk, we shall succeed in removing
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 99

D-plus. But notice that in doing so we shall be slicing off limit points
belonging to the exterior space; for the points on the circle are limit
points of the exterior as well as limit points of D (this holds equally
for D-plus and D-minus, both of which include the points on the
circle as limit points). The disk D and the exterior space around it
share the circle as a common boundary. Of course this means that
if we should cut into the plane in such a way that leaves all of the
points on the circle attached to the exterior space, we’ll thereby be
cutting limit points off the disk D; what we’ll then detach is D-
minus, a disk denuded of its limit points. (And we could cut into
the plane in such a way that distributes the limit points in greater
or lesser portions between the disk D and the exterior, thus leaving
some of the boundary attached to each piece – but thereby stripping
off some limit points of each one as well.)
So, no matter how deftly we impose a cut to separate the whole
space into disjoint parts, some limit points of one part will always
wind up inside the other part. It is in exactly this sense that a
connected space such as our plane is a seamless whole that has no
“natural joints” at which it can be divided. Rather, any cut into a
connected space must be arbitrary and, indeed, disordering.

2.3 Cohesion, Connectedness, and Aristotle’s Dictum:


The View of 1671
With the perspective provided by our brief foray into contemporary
topology, we can now throw a little fresh light on Leibniz’s account
of cohesion and continuity. As I mentioned before, on the early
conatus physics cohesion is a common motion plus something extra
– conatus or an endeavor. Here is the significance of adding conatus
into the mix: the parts of cohesive bodies not only move with a
common motion, but also they strive or endeavor to be in the same
place. And as those parts press together at their boundaries, they
start to interpenetrate very slightly (cf. G VII,572–4 (July 1670),
VI,2,263–76 (Winter 1670–1)). At their locus of contact they come
to share an “extremum,” that is, a limit or boundary, and thus come
to overlap – even if only momentarily and at an inassignably small
place. Two spheres might cohere by striving to cross one another’s
boundaries and coinciding at a single limit point; or two flat bodies
might cohere and thus come to share a single limiting planar surface.
100 SAMUEL LEVEY

In his letter to Hobbes of July 1670, Leibniz writes about


cohesion:
I should think that the endeavor [conatus] of the parts towards each other, ôr
the motion through which they press upon each other, would itself suffice to
explain the cohesion of bodies. For bodies which press upon each other endeavor
to penetrate each other. The endeavor is beginning; the penetration is the union.
So they are beginning to unite. But when bodies begin to unite, their surfaces
or boundaries [initia vel termini] are one. Bodies whose boundaries [termini] are
one, ôr ta eschata hen, are according to Aristotle’s definition not only contiguous
but continuous, and truly one body, movable in one motion. (G VII,573)

That account of cohesion as involving an overlap or sharing of


extrema is significant for Leibniz’s thinking about the issue of
continuity. For as he notes in a very similar tone in his Theoria
Motus Abstracti (“Theory of Abstract Motion”, 1670–1), written the
following winter,
things whose extrema are one, hôn ta eschata hen, are continuous ôr cohering,
by Aristotle’s definition too, since if two things are in one place, one cannot be
impelled without the other. (A VI,2,266.)

And, once again, this view which we are finding expressed in the
1670 letter to Hobbes and in the TMA is recapped with especial
clarity in the 1672 piece “On the Cohesiveness of Bodies,” where
Leibniz writes,
it is clear that any conatus whatsoever already begins to have an effect [iam
incipere efficere], even if the effect is smaller than any assignable. Hence it
follows that whatever endeavors to move into another’s place already at its bound-
ary [extremo] begins to exist in the other’s place, i.e. their boundaries [extrema]
are one ôr [sive] penetrate each other, and consequently one cannot be impelled
without the other. And consequently these bodies are continuous. (A VI,3,96)

A richly metaphysical upshot of the new conatus-based account of


cohesion is being articulated in these passages: what interpenetrat-
ing parts of matter establish in the physical world is not just cohesion
and contiguity, but continuity.
Is this a tenable conclusion on Leibniz’s part? We can now see
that it is. For “those things whose boundaries are one” would form a
whole that satisfies a condition intuitively similar to connectedness.
In order to separate those parts from the whole they form, it seems
that any cut we should impose would “tear” their common boundary
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 101

off one part and leave it attached only to the other. If cohesion indeed
requires numerically distinct bodies to share a common boundary,
then it can be said to generate continuity in the physical world,
in a clear proto-topological sense of the term ‘continuity’. And
consequently it seems that bodies distinguished by their individual
motions could, nonetheless, still be parts of a continuum, precisely
by being connected in this way.
There is a point worth emphasizing about this Leibnizian account
of cohesion that ascribes connectedness to cohesive bodies. Properly
understood, Leibniz’s view should be that connectedness supervenes
on cohesion – and not that connectedness explains or causes it.
Cohering parts of matter come to be continuous because they are
interpenetrating at their boundaries, and as those boundaries coin-
cide they “become one.” But the shared boundary at the locus of
contact between cohering parts of a cohesive body is not a “glue”
that holds those parts together; it is the result of cohesion, not
a source of it. While this point should be clear enough from the
account, it is not hard to get the order of explanation running back-
wards and treat the cohesiveness of a body as due to its parts
being joined by common boundaries; and indeed we can sometimes
find Leibniz himself reversing the order, as for example in the last
passage quoted above where near the end he says, “their boundaries
are one ôr penetrate each other, and consequently one cannot be
impelled without the other.” This is an error, if only a slip. In the
very next sentence Leibniz sets the account right again, drawing out
the metaphysical consequence from the physical theory of cohesion:
“And consequently these bodies are continuous.”

2.4 Switching Between Potentiality and Connectedness


All that marks a sharp change from the view Leibniz outlined just
a year or two earlier in the 1669 letter to Thomasius, according to
which cohering but distinct parts would still be strictly discontinu-
ous and cohesively united only by a common motion. Thus in that
respect, the divergence of the 1671 TMA account from the earlier
one of 1669 entails a change of mind – or, at any rate, a change of
commitments – on a key point. Whereas in 1669 Leibniz held that
“in order to have a variety of boundaries arising in matter a discon-
tinuity of the parts is necessary” (A VI,2,435), on the 1671 TMA
102 SAMUEL LEVEY

account this claim about discontinuity must be seen as false. Rather,


a variety of boundaries can arise in a mass of matter whose parts are
strictly continuous with one another. Does this mean that a variety
of distinct actual parts can, if cohering, form a true continuum?
Apparently that is what Leibniz means to defend, and indeed the
TMA takes as its first fundamentum praedemonstrabile the following
claim:
Parts are actually assigned in the continuum. (A VI,2,264; italics in original)

The conatus physics of 1671 now stands vividly in contrast with the
earlier view of 1669, especially regarding the analysis of continuity
and the structure of matter. Whereas in 1669 matter is discontinuous
and the continuum is defined as lacking an assignment into parts,
now in 1671 parts are assigned in a continuum and cohesive material
bodies are continuous. But Leibniz’s allegiance to the thesis that
the continuum has actually assigned parts is very short-lived, as his
enthusiasm for that “first principle” dries up along with the conatus
physics of the TMA and its specific claim that cohering bodies share
an extremum or boundary. By the autumn of 1676 he shifts back,
this time permanently, to the 1669 view that the continuum has no
actual parts and that a variety of boundaries cannot arise in matter
without some discontinuity.
Why does Leibniz switch back and forth on those basic principles
concerning matter and continuity? Part of the answer is simply that
he abandons the interpenetration account of cohesion, and so far
I have attributed his doing so to the fact that the conatus physics,
upon which that account of cohesion is based, falls through when
in March of 1676 Leibniz comes to reject the notion of an infinites-
imal quantity. So we can see his retreat from the view that matter is
continuous as in part a consequence of his views in the philosophy
of mathematics evolving in a way that undermines his original basis
for holding cohesive bodies to be connected quantities.
And there is another element in his thought that should also be
mentioned as a possible contributing factor in his abandoning the
interpenetration account of cohesion. Sometime between 1672 and
1676 Leibniz comes to accept an ancient line of argument for the
impossibility of a “state of change” or “middle state,” i.e., a state
which could serve as the common boundary between two contrary
states, such as a state of dying that lies between life and death, or
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 103

a state of perfect rest that lies between the rise and fall of a stone
that is tossed straight up in the air.21 On the view he comes to adopt,
there are no such middle states mediating change from one state to
another but rather change is to be analyzed as a “composite” or “the
point of contact or aggregate of two opposite states” (A VI,3,541).
If this thesis covers not only cases of alleged middle states joining
two opposing states that exist one after another but also the case
of boundaries between distinct bodies that exist one adjacent to
another, it yields an argument against the possibility of cohesion
of two bodies via their sharing a common boundary. For the alleged
common boundary would be just such a middle state between the
one body and the other, and allowing the existence of this bound-
ary would then contradict Leibniz’s denial of middle states. Since
cohering bodies would therefore have to be joined only by contact
in which their separate boundaries are touching, the interpenetration
account of cohesion would be disqualified; and the view of material
bodies as continuous (i.e. connected) quantities that rests on it would
again be left ungrounded.22 So we can also see Leibniz’s shift away
from the c. 1671 thesis that matter is continuous as due in part to his
acceptance of an argument against middle states.
While both of those developments in Leibniz’s thought can be
seen as factors that contribute to his abandoning the interpene-
tration account of cohesion, and thus can offer us some rationale
to explain why he shifts back and forth between opposing views
about the structure of matter (whether it’s discrete or continuous)
and the nature of the continuum (whether it’s indeterminate or actu-
ally assigned with parts), in fact I think his wavering here is a clue
to something still more philosophically interesting and instructive.
And this brings us to the interpretive point highlighted in the title
of this paper. I suggest that his changes of mind – especially about
whether the continuum has actually assigned parts – signal the pres-
ence of two subtly different concepts at work in Leibniz’s thinking,
either one of which might be expressed by the term ‘continuity’.
On the one hand, there is the concept of connectedness, or at any
rate a similar proto-topological concept that finds expression in
Aristotle’s dictum, “Continuous things are those whose boundaries
are one.” On the other, there is the more metaphysically-oriented
concept of continuity as potentiality, where this is opposed to actu-
104 SAMUEL LEVEY

ality, and of the continuum as something indefinite or indeterminate,


indifferently assignable into parts but not actually so assigned.
As we have seen, the connectedness of an extensum is compat-
ible with (although it does not entail) its containing a variety of
actually assigned boundaries and parts, under the proviso that those
parts are not separable in the sense that any meaningful cut into a
connected extensum will tear limit points off one part and deposit
them in the other. Obviously, however, the potentiality concept of
continuity is not compatible with the idea that a continuum might
contain such a variety of actual parts and boundaries; for on an
account of continuity as potentiality the presence of actual bound-
aries in the whole will always require discontinuity of the parts. I
believe that Leibniz’s apparently dramatic changes of mind concern-
ing the character of the continuum mark a pair of shifts between
those two concepts of continuity or the continuous. Leibniz initially
thinks of the continuous primarily from the point of view of the
potentiality concept that prevents the continuum from containing
actually assigned parts and boundaries. He then (c. 1670–1) shifts to
thinking of it primarily from the point of view of a proto-topological
connectedness concept that allows for a continuum to have actually
assigned parts and boundaries. And by mid-1676 he shifts back to
the potentiality concept once again.
A further small consideration can help to cement our account of
Leibniz’s early double-switch on the nature of continuity. There is
a sense in which the connectedness concept naturally aligns with an
interpenetration account of cohesion. If cohering bodies interpene-
trate and thus share a common boundary, then, as we have seen, in
order for those bodies to be separated that boundary will apparently
need to be “shorn off” at least one of them. Notice how the language
and imagery most natural for discussing the concept of connected-
ness are loaded with allusions to the concept of cohesion – as indeed
are the topological terms ‘connected’ and ‘separable’ themselves.
Interestingly, the same was true in Aristotle’s time. Consider what he
says about the proto-topological concept of continuity in the critical
passage from the Physics:

The contiguous is what is in succession and touching. . . . The continuous [to


suneches] is a species of the contiguous. I call things ‘continuous’ when the
boundaries of each at which they are touching become one and the same and, as
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 105

the name implies, they are “stuck together” [sunechêtai]. But this is not possible
if the extrema are two. It is clear from this definition that continuity belongs to
those things from which a unity naturally arises in virtue of their being joined
together [kata tên sunapsin]. (Physics, 227a6, 227a10–15)

I suspect the fact that the connectedness concept tends on its


own to gravitate towards the idea of cohesion may well incline
a thoughtful defender of the interpenetration account of cohesion
towards precisely that concept of continuity. If that’s right, then it
is not hard to guess why Leibniz switches in his thinking about
continuity to the proto-topological connectedness concept during
the very time when he favors the conatus physics and the interpen-
etration account of cohesion. That account and the connectedness
concept are, as it were, made for each other. Once that account of
cohesion is abandoned, however, the intuitive pressure to think of
continuity as connectedness, rather than as potentiality, is relieved.
And in the wake of abandoning that account of cohesion, Leibniz
indeed switches back to the view he is originally and more deeply
disposed to have of continuity, namely, that of the potentiality
concept.

3. THE METAPHYSICALLY PROBLEMATIC STRUCTURE OF


LEIBNIZIAN MATTER

3.1 The Actuality of Matter


The two concepts of continuity I have tried to distinguish in
Leibniz’s thought – potentiality and connectedness – are not mutu-
ally exclusive. It is possible to hold a continuum to be a connected
space in which parts and boundaries are merely potential or inde-
terminate, indifferently assignable but not actually assigned. And I
think such a two-aspect account is in fact probably nearest Leibniz’s
own most considered view of the continuum. Recall, for example,
how both of our two continuity concepts are visible in the 1669
letter to Thomasius. First, continuous quantity is said to be inter-
minatum or unbounded: it is not cut into parts, and boundaries
(termini) are not actually assigned in it. But second, Aristotle’s
dictum about continuity is also invoked: continuous things are those
whose boundaries are one, that is, they’re connected.
106 SAMUEL LEVEY

I suspect also that it is the potentiality concept that really runs


most deeply in Leibniz’s thought about the continuum. During that
episode in the 1670s when he reverses his view about the poten-
tiality of the continuum, Leibniz is being brought on the strength
of an interpenetration account of the cohesion of matter to allow
the connectedness concept full sway, so to speak, in his thinking
about continuity. It holds full sway even to the point of being able to
override the potentiality concept’s requirement that a continuum be
only indifferently divisible into parts rather than have parts actually
assigned in it.
How can this have happened? How can a passing account of
cohesion have tempted Leibniz to suspend the rules stemming from
what I claim is his deepest current of thought about continuity? The
answer, I think, is that that account of cohesion engages a line of
Leibniz’s thinking that runs more deeply than any of his views of
continuity: it engages his commitment to the actuality of matter. At
all points Leibniz holds that matter is “actual” in the sense of that
term which contrasts with being merely potential: matter is fully
determinate or definite, ontologically speaking; all the details of its
structure are in some important sense filled-in or actually assigned.
This view is clear already in a passage at A VI,2,435 (from the
1669 letter to Thomasius), quoted above, where matter is said to
have parts and boundaries “actually assigned” in it. And likewise in
the later metaphysics it shines out across Leibniz’s writings as he
comes to call material bodies “actuals” precisely to underline their
contrast with continua, which are merely indeterminate, potential,
and express only how it is possible for divisions to be made in
the extended world “without having to bother with divisions actu-
ally made” (G IV,491). We have also considered already a handful
of later passages that detail this commitment, passages in which
Leibniz writes that unlike in the continuum, “in actuals there is
nothing indefinite” (1706. G II,282), or that “in real things, namely
in bodies, the parts are not indefinite . . . but are actually assigned a
certain way” (1704. G II,268). He also writes in 1705 to Princess
Sophie that “the mass of bodies is actually divided in a determinate
manner, and nothing in it is precisely continuous,” and then carries
the point ahead quite vividly a few lines later:
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 107

There are, therefore, always actual divisions and variations in the masses of exist-
ing bodies, to whatever degree of smallness one might go. It is the imperfection
of our senses that makes us conceive physical things as mathematical beings in
which there is some indeterminacy. (1705. G VII,562–3)

There is a bounty of such examples, and even where the texts are
not so explicit in emphasizing how the actuality of matter’s internal
structure of parts and boundaries sets it apart from the indeter-
minacy of a continuum, the basic idea that matter is actually divided
– indeed, actually infinitely divided – and not just divisible into
parts is a resounding and pervasive theme in the theory of matter.
“Created things are actually infinite,” Leibniz writes in a fragment
dated sometime between 1677 and 1685, “For any body whatever
is actually divided into several parts” (VE 1129); and similarly: “I
suppose that every body is actually divided into several parts, which
are also bodies” (VE 1127). In a letter to Burcher de Volder he
states unequivocally, “In truth, matter is not continuous but discrete,
and actually infinitely divided” (G II,278). And – once again in the
31 October 1705 letter to Sophie – the actually infinite division
of matter is enlisted directly in illuminating the contrast between
the determinacy of the structure of matter and the indeterminacy
essential to continuity:
The better to conceive the actual division of matter to infinity, and the exclu-
sion that there is of all exact and indeterminate continuity, we must consider that
God has already produced there as much order and variety as it was possible to
introduce there until now, and thus nothing has remained indeterminate there. (G
VII,562f.)

It might not be overstating the case to say that the actuality of matter
is just about Leibniz’s deepest commitment of all in metaphysics (or,
at any rate, a commitment than which none is deeper).
Keeping the actuality of matter in mind, it becomes easier to
see how Leibniz can come, even temporarily, to reject the require-
ments laid down by the potentiality concept of continuity. We might
reconstruct the path of his thought summarily as follows: (1) On
the strength of the interpenetration account of cohesion, cohesive
material bodies are connected, for their parts share common bound-
aries; (2) by Aristotle’s dictum (which the new account of cohesion
has now raised to salience) what is connected is continuous; and so,
cohesive material bodies are continuous; (3) but matter is actual:
108 SAMUEL LEVEY

its parts and boundaries are actually assigned; hence, (4) there are
actually assigned parts and boundaries even in a continuum.
Yet as I mentioned before, the interpenetration account of
cohesion is fleeting, and once it has gone the connectedness concept
no longer holds full sway in Leibniz’s thought. By autumn of 1676,
at the latest, the potentiality concept reëmerges in what is to be its
permanent place at the center of his analysis of continuity.

3.2 Trouble in the Account: Minima and Unconnected Matter


With the potentiality concept thus reinstated, the actuality of matter
becomes decisive in settling the issue about the relationship between
matter and continuity. Matter is not continuous. For when continuity
is thought of primarily from the point of view of the potentiality
concept, it will follow that matter – as something actual, deter-
minate, assigned, &c. – simply has to be seen as a discrete quantity
and not a continuous one. And as we have seen that is in fact the
view that Leibniz defends over the next thirty or more years of his
life.23
But the connectedness concept has not been altogether banished
from Leibniz’s philosophy. On the contrary, a look at a passage from
a less familiar (and somewhat less metaphysical) writing of the later
years turns up a remarkably exact statement of connectedness in the
following definition of the continuum:
A continuum is a whole any two of whose co-integrating24 parts (ôr parts which
taken together coincide with the whole) have something in common, and indeed if
they are not redundant ôr have no part in common – that is [sive], if the aggregate
of the magnitude of the aggregated parts is equal to the whole – then they have at
least some one boundary [terminum] in common. (c. 1686–92? GM VII,284)

So the idea of connectedness does still remain alive in his thought;


it has simply slipped back out of the spotlight. And from its
background position it manages to leave its imprint forever upon
Leibniz’s metaphysics of matter. For when he composes his account
of matter as a discrete quantity rather than a continuous one, what
results is a theory set in counterpoint to both of the two concepts of
continuity we have explored. On his view, not only is matter discrete
and not continuous in the sense that it is actual rather than potential,
but also matter is not connected. Its parts are always discontinuous
things in Aristotle’s sense: they are those whose boundaries are two.
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 109

Each and every part of matter has “its own separate boundaries,”
and thus no body made up of them, however cohesive, can truly be
connected.
Yet consider how this will be equally true of any mass of matter
you like, for the parts of any mass of matter are themselves always
just more bits of matter, and are therefore discrete rather than
continuous quantities. Thus having still finer parts of their own
whose boundaries are two and actually separate, these bits of matter
are likewise not connected; and neither are the finer parts of the
bits, nor the finer parts of the finer parts, and so on, ad infinitum.
Matter as a discrete quantity is fully actual and actually unconnected
everywhere.
That consequence is disastrous for Leibniz’s metaphysics of
matter. It entails, among other thing, that matter ultimately resolves
into a powder, so to speak, of isolated points; or if not points,
exactly, then at least isolated simple indivisible particles – what
Leibniz in various places in the early writings calls ‘minima’. This
is a deep problem because on his view minima can be only modes
of extended things and never parts of them nor things in their own
right; and he is often at pains to declare that a resolution of matter
into isolated minima is impossible. Indeed, as I have argued at length
elsewhere, much of the design his theory of matter is controlled
specifically by the task of avoiding even the possibility that any
part of matter, however small, should turn out to be minimal.25
Matter’s being actually unconnected everywhere, however, shatters
that commitment by requiring the existence of isolated minima or
point-like particles of matter.

3.3 A Leibnizian Argument for the Commitment to Isolated Minima


It is not difficult to secure a fairly tight argument to demonstrate this
resolution of matter into minima – or at any rate, the existence of at
least some isolated minima (infinitely many!) in matter – and in fact
we can comfortably follow the lead of young Leibniz himself. For in
1670 he hit upon an intriguing strategy for showing the existence of
infinitesimal particles in a continuum, and only a slight modification
of that strategy is needed to produce a demonstration of the existence
of isolated minima in a body of matter that is actually unconnected
everywhere.
110 SAMUEL LEVEY

Figure 3.

Here is Leibniz:
Let there be a line ab, to be traversed by some motion. Since some beginning of
motion is intelligible in that line, so also will be a beginning of the line traversed
by the beginning of the motion. Let this beginning of the line be ac. But it is
evident that dc can be subtracted from it without subtracting the beginning. And if
ad is believed to be the beginning, from it ed can be subtracted without subtracting
the beginning, and so on ad infinitum. For even if my hand is unable and my soul
unwilling to pursue the division to infinity, it can nevertheless be understood at
once that everything that can be subtracted without subtracting the beginning does
not involve the beginning. And since the substraction can be done to infinity (for
the continuum, as others have demonstrated, is divisible to infinity), it follows
that the beginning of the line, i.e. that which is traversed in the beginning of the
motion, is infinitely small. (1672–3, A VI,3,98–9)

Leibniz’s tactic of inverting the pattern of Zeno’s celebrated dicho-


tomy paradox works to dazzling effect, and it can be transposed to
an argument for the existence of an isolated extremum. Though the
argument will only be sketched here, it will, I think, be sketched in
enough detail to indicate how a fully rigorous statement would run.
Relying on Leibniz’s diagram above, suppose the line ab is
unconnected everywhere, i.e. that ab itself and every part of ab
can be exhaustively decomposed into two parts neither of which
includes any limit points of the other. We can show that the
extremum a (the left-hand endpoint) is an isolated element of ab
– that is, we can show that the extremum a can be separated from
the rest of ab. Since ab is unconnected everywhere, the segment cb
can be separated from any segment that includes a – indeed, from
a metaphysically rigorous point of view cb is already actually so
separated, and thus we shall say that a is isolated from cd. Likewise,
the segment db can be separated from any segment that includes
a, so a is isolated from db. The same holds for eb, and indeed for
any proper right-hand segment of ab you like, for ab is unconnected
everywhere. The extremum a is therefore isolated from every proper
right-hand segment (every proper right-hand part) of ab, for “even
if my hand is unable and my soul unwilling to pursue the separation
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 111

to infinity, it can nevertheless be understood at once that everything


that can be separated from a segment that includes the extremum a
is isolated from a.” But every segment of ab overlaps some proper
right-hand segment or other of ab; ab itself is nothing more than
the sum of its proper right-hand segments, plus the extremum a
– the extremum a is the only element of ab that does not overlap
any proper right-hand segment of ab. Since a is isolated from each
of those right-hand segments, a can be separated from the sum of
them all, i.e. a can be separated from the rest of ab. Indeed, from
a metaphysically rigorous point of view, it is already actually so
separated. Hence the extremum a is an isolated element of ab.
Obviously the argument can be applied equally to any point of
division that can be assigned in ab, and according to Leibniz there
will be actually infinitely many such points of division in ab – just
as there will be in any quantity of matter. Consequently his account
is committed to the existence of infinitely many isolated minima
existing in any quantity of matter.
I suggested a little while ago that matter, as an unconnected
quantity, would actually be divided into finer and finer parts ad infin-
itum. That claim should be qualified somewhat. The actual division
of matter into an infinity of ever finer parts only follows from
matter’s being unconnected if we additionally suppose that no part
of matter can be perfectly simple in the sense of being minimal or
totally without parts. (A minimal part would be trivially connected,
since there is no way to partition it into two nonempty disjoint parts
that have no limits in common.) Now, as I said, it is in fact an
element of Leibniz’s view that there are no minimal or partless parts
of matter. So he will in fact be committed to the consequence that all
of matter – every single bit of it however small – is actually divided
everywhere into an infinity of still smaller parts. And with this sort
of infinite division in place, some further problems for his meta-
physics of matter are going to arise. For example, by Leibniz’s own
lights, infinite division everywhere should have as a consequence
the proposition that there isn’t any matter.26 Also, under yet other
Leibnizian principles about parts and wholes, infinite division every-
where will entail that matter is subject to a vicious regress of parts
within parts ad infinitum.27 But as those “infinity problems” are
not immediate consequences of matter’s being unconnected every-
112 SAMUEL LEVEY

where, I shall be content at this point simply to raise them as


charges and rely on previous discussions to fill them out. For the
concerns of the present paper focus narrowly around the concepts of
continuity and the way Leibniz’s account of the structure of matter
is immediately responsive to those concepts.
With the difficulties facing the Leibnizian account of matter
before us, it is interesting to note that Leibniz was not forced into
a commitment to the proposition that matter is unconnected every-
where. He commits himself to it by reacting to the connectedness
concept when he formulates the conditions that a part of matter must
satisfy in order to be discrete and not continuous. But in doing so he
overreacts. His real basis for holding that matter is discrete and not
continuous is that whereas continuity requires potentiality, matter is
“fully actual.” But the actuality of matter carries no special prohibi-
tion against matter’s being connected. Or at least it’s not just obvious
that a connected magnitude must somehow fail to be fully actual.
Once we have this idea clearly in mind, a new possibility emerges.
Why not take matter to be a fully actual connected quantity? That
is, why not propose that matter has a variety of parts and boundaries
actually assigned in it, and that the neighboring parts of cohesive
bodies share a common boundary at their locus of contact?
On a proposal of this sort matter would still come out as discrete
and not continuous, and the difficulty about matter resolving into
a powder of isolated minima would arise because one would not
be committed to matter’s being unconnected everywhere. When
Leibniz demands that matter as a discrete quantity must not be
connected, he is essentially treating connectedness as a sufficient
condition for continuity. But once the potentiality concept is back
in place as the focal point in his analysis of continuity – as it is
after 1676 – there is no longer any compelling reason to think that
connectedness must be sufficient for continuity. By holding matter
to be unconnected as well as fully actual, Leibniz effectively closes
off what should have been a wide-open possible view of its structure.
But alas, even this “possible view” of the structure of matter may
not truly be open to Leibniz, for quite a different reason: an actu-
ally connected quantity whose contiguous parts share their common
boundaries would run into conflict with Leibniz’s denial of middle
states – if, that is, his denial of middle states in fact extends widely
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 113

enough to include a denial of shared boundaries. Perhaps it does not


extend so widely; but just as likely his various commitments at this
point simply cannot be brought into perfect balance.
In the end I suspect Leibniz is never truly or completely aware
of the presence of two different continuity concepts in his thought,
and thus I suspect that he simply sees his denial of the connec-
tedness of matter as part and parcel with his denial that matter
is a continuous quantity. Had he sorted out properly those two
concepts of continuity, perhaps Leibniz would have achieved a more
satisfactory theory of the structure of matter. Having sorted them
out ourselves, I think we can begin to see with more clarity just
what that theory actually is, and more importantly, just what Leib-
niz’s thoughts actually are on the distinction between matter and
continuity.28

NOTES
1 The open territory here remains very large. In this paper I shall leave aside
(among the many related topics in Leibniz) many of the nuances of Leibniz’s
later thought concerning continuity and continuous orderings, his views about the
construction of points, lines, and planes, his account of a link between continu-
ity and possibility, etc. For a good discussion of some aspects of Leibniz’s later
accounts of continuity not taken up in the present paper, see Timothy Crockett,
“Continuity in Leibniz’s Mature Metaphysics,” also in this issue.
2 I am responsible throughout for translations of Leibniz and Descartes, but

in translating Descartes I have consulted Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch,


eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), and in translating Leibniz, Leroy Loemker, ed., Philo-
sophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1969)
and R. Ariew and D. Garber, eds., Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Co., 1989). Also, for Leibniz’s writings in A VI,3, I have consulted
manuscripts of Richard Arthur’s forthcoming translation volume, Leibniz and
the Labyrinth of the Continuum: Leibniz’s Writings on the Continuum 1672–
1686, to be published in the Yale Leibniz Series. I abbreviate the primary texts
thus: A = Berlin Academy Edition, Samtliche Schriften und Briefe: Philosoph-
ische Schriften, Series VI, Vols. 1–3, 6 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. 1923–80);
AT = Adam and Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, revised edition (Paris:
Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1964–76); C = Couturat, ed., Opuscules et Fragments inédits de
Leibniz (Paris: Alcan, 1903); G = Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften,
Vols. 1–7 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1875–90); GM = Gerhardt,
ed., Mathematische Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Vols. 1–7 (Berlin:
A. Asher; Halle: H.W. Schmidt, 1849–63). References to AT, G and GM are
114 SAMUEL LEVEY

to volume and page numbers; references to C and VE are to page numbers;


references to A are to series, volume and page numbers. Also, I follow Arthur
in adopting a notational convention (initiated by Edwin Curley) for translating
the Latin term seu, which (like sive) corresponds to the English term ‘or’ where it
implies equivalence: seu = or in other words, that is to say, etc. In the translations
of the Latin, I mark the occurrences of this “ ‘or’ of equivalence” in Leibniz’s text
with a circumflex, thus: ôr.
3 The earliest passage I know of where Leibniz explicitly defends the plenum

hypothesis is A, VI,525 dated to March 1676. And there he takes pains to point
out that the hypothesis is not merely presupposed; rather, he argues for it. But
the view of nature as a plenum seems clearly to be a backdrop for many of his
discussions from 1671 to 1672 onward.
4 In fact in this letter Leibniz presents two possible ways in which discontinuity

might arise: “first, in such a way that contiguity is at the same time destroyed,
when the parts are so pulled apart from each other that a vacuum is left; or in
such a way that contiguity remains” (A VI,2,435). His ensuing discussion makes
it clear that it is the latter possibility which keenly interests him, and that it is the
one he holds to be how discontinuity is actually introduced into matter.
5 Aristotle’s definition occurs at Physics 231a21, 227a10–15, and Metaphysics

1069a5–8.
6 Perhaps we should say it is a mere contiguum: a contiguum that is not also a

continuum. For on the usual Aristotelian account that Leibniz observes here, the
continuous is a special case (the limiting case) of the contiguous: the continuous
are both “those whose boundaries are together” and “those whose boundaries are
one.” See, for example, Aristotle, Physics 227a10f., and Leibniz’s remarks about
the continuous and the contiguous at A VI,3,94, and 537.
7 It’s hard to capture the subtle imagery at work here in a close translation.

Leibniz’s materia turbans evokes a picture of a body of matter as a disorderly


crowd: a multitude of agitating individuals, each with its own distinctive actions,
yet nonetheless collectively displaying a sort of unity by participating in a greater
common motion.
8 In a piece whose date is not clearly established (the Akademie editors place it

anywhere between 1677–1695), Leibniz writes in much the same vein: “The prin-
ciple of cohesion is harmonizing motion [motus conspirans], and that of fluidity
is varying motion” (VE 495).
9 This is to remain Leibniz’s view, in the slightly evolved form of the thesis that

nothing is absolutely fluid or solid, but rather that all matter is to some degree
or other pliant, and that motion accounts for this. In a piece dated to 1683–6,
“On the Existing World,” he writes: “Therefore it must be said that no point can
be assigned in the world which is not set in motion somewhat differently from
any other point however near to it, but, on the other hand, that no point can be
assigned which does not have some motion in common with some other given
point in the world; under the former head, all bodies are fluid; under the latter, all
are cohering. But to the extent that a common or proper motion is more or less
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 115

observable, a body is called on solid, or a separate body, or perhaps even a fluid”


(VE 420).
10 There’s a lot of text here. For an overview, see Hartz, G. and Cover, J.

“Space and Time in the Leibnizian Metaphysic,” Noûs 22 (1988): 493–519. See
also, J.E. McGuire, “ ‘Labyrinthus Continui’: Leibniz on Substance, Activity
and Matter,” in Machamer and Turnbull (eds.), Motion and Time, Space and
Matter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976) 290–326; Glenn Hartz,
“Leibniz’s Phenomenalisms,” The Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 511–49;
Richard Arthur, “Russell’s Conundrum: On the Relation of Leibniz’s Monads
to the Continuum.” In Brown and Mittelstrass (eds.), An Intimate Relation
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989) 171–201; and Chapter III of my “Matter, Unity
and Infinity in Early Leibniz” (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1997).
Although the period of Leibniz’s writings that I have in mind here is a vaguely
bounded one, spanning more than a decade, I believe the purest expressions of
the views hat he holds during this time emerge near its end, in the years closely
surrounding 1705. For that reason, and for brevity, I shall refer to the accounts
of matter and continuity that Leibniz defends in this period as belonging to “the
1705 metaphysics.”
11 Elsewhere is “Leibniz’s Constructivism and Infinitely Folded Matter,” forth-

coming in Genarro and Huenemann (eds.), New Essays on the Rationalists


(Oxford University Press, 1999). Also, in section 1 of that paper the modalized
spin on continuity is discussed briefly.
12 More precisely, it’s something that is not a feature of the Cartesian view as

Leibniz would have seen it. For in Descartes’ Optics one can find an ideas of
an “action or tendency to move” (which “it is necessary to distinguish from”
movement itself) that could naturally be read as a cousin concept to Leibniz’s
conatus (cf. AT VI,88). But while Leibniz certainly read Principles 1–2 closely,
there is no clear evidence to suggest that he is (in 1670–2, at any rate) aware of
that particular element of Descartes’ views in the Optics. My thanks to Alison
Simmons for bringing that element of the Optics to my attention.
13 In one important sense, however, the conatus physics does stay alive. The

picture of the material world as invested throughout with centers of motion – the
picture of the conatus world with its principles of action that are in each of the
infinitely many parts of matter and ground their physical properties – this will
quietly keep its grip on Leibniz’s thought for some time, and rearise explicitly in
his later efforts to found physics upon a metaphysics of immaterial and “active”
first principles: another role that is to be ascribed to the monads. In this way one
might say that the ontology of conati “transforms” into the ontology of monads
in the later years. But as a basic account of physical phenomena – of motion,
cohesion, impact, and so on – the early theory of endeavors has run its course by
late spring of 1676. For some (albeit brief) discussion of Leibniz’s rejection of
infinitesimals see fn. 8 of my “Leibniz on Mathematics and the Actually Infinite
Division of Matter,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (January 1998).
14 Michael White is the first to make this point that the concept of a seamless

or natural whole finds expression in the contemporary topological concept of


116 SAMUEL LEVEY

connectedness. For a fine discussion of some related issues in Aristotle’s philo-


sophy (including Physics 227a6 and 227a10–15 that I quote below on pages 24–5)
and the philosophy of topology, see his “On Continuity: Aristotle Versus Topo-
logy?” History and Philosophy of Logic, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1988), 1–12.
15 I appeal to point-set topology in order to motivate in a clear way the concept of

connectedness; I am not proposing here to model Leibniz’s account of matter and


continuity in that framework. The latter project would not be a straightforward
one, for (inter alia) the idea of “indistant” contiguous closed regions would not
be consistent with the usual metric topology. That is, the usual way of defining a
metric on a topological space won’t allow for two distinct surfaces to be at “no
distance” from one another (though a non-standard approach might still do it).
More importantly, however, the ontology of point sets would simply be anathema
to Leibniz. The right approach to capturing Leibniz’s account would, I suspect,
require a model in combinatorial topology. I discuss this approach in a work
in progress, tentatively entitled “Discontinuity and the Structure of Motion in
Leibniz’s Metaphysics.”
16 Cf. James Munkres, Topology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975);

Michael Henle, A Combinatorial Introduction to Topology (New York: Dover,


1979); Paul Alexandroff, Elementary Concepts of Topology (New York: Dover,
1961).
17 % is a set of open subsets of space S.

(1) The whole space S and the empty set are elements of %.
(2) The union of any number (finite, countable or uncountable) of sets of from %
is in %.
(3) The intersection of any finite number of sets from % is in %.
18 We shall assume throughout that all the point spaces discussed have the “usual
topology” for Euclidean spaces, namely, the order topology and its self-products.
19 In fact, this definition of a limit point is broad enough to include all the interior

points of a set as limit points, as well as those that fall on the boundary. For our
purposes, we shall be considering only those limit points that are also boundary
points (i.e. those limit points that are not also interior points).
20 A separation of a topological space S is more usually defined as a pair of

nonempty, disjoint, open sets S and V such that the union (U ∪ V) = S. Our
definition in terms of limit points is equivalent, but brings out more clearly the
issues of our immediate concern.
21 Leibniz’s fullest expression of the argument for this conclusion, which I won’t

rehearse here, occurs near the outset of Pacidius Philalethi (cf. A, VI,3,534–41),
though when he writes the Pacidius in autumn of 1676 he has been warming up
to that line of argument for some time.
22 It should be noted that in a passage near the end of the Pacidius’s main discus-

sion of middle states there is a remark that poses a prima facie challenge to my
suggestion here that the argument against middle states might be seen as ruling
out the existence of common boundaries and with it the related account of cohe-
sion. The primary interlocutor, Charinus, while offering an example of a perfectly
MATTER AND TWO CONCEPTS OF CONTINUITY 117

round sphere resting on a perfectly flat table, says in passing: “It is clear that the
sphere does not cohere with the plane, and that they have no extrema in common,
otherwise one would not be able to move without the other” (A VI,3,537). This
certainly suggests that the account of cohesion as boundary-sharing is in the air
(even if it’s not exactly asserted), and the interlocutors do not go on later to point
out that the argument against middle states defeats that account of cohesion. But in
my view, also to be defended in “Discontinuity and the Structure of Motion,” this
account of cohesion, like so many of the ideas mentioned early in the Pacidius, is
rehearsed as a feature of Leibniz’s previous thought, and it is not an element of
the most considered views that are ultimately endorsed in the dialogue; moreover,
Leibniz’s final commitments in the Pacidius, and the overall gist of his remarks
about middle states and continuity that occur as the dialogue progresses, do seem
to militate against the account of cohesion as boundary-sharing.
23 This is not to say that the texts are always unwaveringly clear on this point.

As Robert Adams has pointed out, Leibniz can be “quoted on both sides of
the question whether bodies are continuous or whether they only appear to be
continuous” (Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 233). Yet I do not believe there is a very serious
worry about Leibniz’s views even in most of the passages (after 1676) in which
he can be quoted apparently on the other side of the question. In the years
shortly following 1676 Leibniz will sometimes call matter ‘continuous’, but I
think it is fairly clear in those contexts that he only means that matter is not
interrupted by void spaces (which accords with a use of ‘continuous’ that he
mentions occasionally in 1676; cf. A VI,3,542). Adams cites a troubling passage
at G IV,394, from 1702, where Leibniz seems to say outright that body [corpus]
is continuous. Though continuity itself does seem to be at stake there, it is
less than clear to me that in the crucial sentence Leibniz is characterizing the
nature of actual material bodies and not, say, an abstract concept of “body” that
simply does not weigh-in on the question whether actual bodies are ultimately
discrete or continuous. Still, even if Leibniz wavers in places, his considered
view about material bodies is abundantly clear and a deeply committed feature of
his metaphysics.
24 The Latin term cointegrantes derives from integro = “to make a whole,” so

Leibniz’s subsequent gloss on “co-integrating parts” is in fact nicely captured


already in the base meaning of his technical term, though that does not come
through in my translation.
25 See my “Leibniz on Mathematics and the Actually Infinite Division of Matter,”

op. cit.
26 The relevant principles are: (1) No infinite aggregate can form a true whole, or

be truly one; and (2) what is not truly one does not truly exist (cf. G II,97,251). The
first of those is especially motivated by the link between the concept of an infinite
whole and Galileo’s paradox. I take this up in detail in “Leibniz on Mathematics,”
op. cit.
27 Leibniz’s own statement of the regress problem – and the argument it yields

for the existence of immaterial substantial unities – can be found at, for example,
118 SAMUEL LEVEY

G II,261, 267, 296. I discuss the regress problem together with some others
(including the “unity problem” mentioned in the previous footnote) in “Leibniz’s
Constructivism and Infinitely Folded Matter,” op. cit.
28 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Dartmouth College and

at the March 1998 Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical


Association. My thanks to both audiences for helpful input. Special thanks also
to Christie Thomas and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for providing comments on
earlier written drafts, and to John O’Leary-Hawthorne, Jan Cover and Timothy
Crockett for helpful discussion.

Department of Philosophy
Dartmouth College
New Hampshire, USA

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