He believed in a " pre-established harmony " as a solution to the mind-body problem, dying 25 years before Leibniz's better & ndash; remembered formulation of the idea.
12.
So, monads and matter are only apparently linked, and there is not even any communication between different monads; there is only the pre-established harmony, which is established and maintained by God.
13.
Every monad is active ( to be is to act ) in the universe consisting of simple psychic monads, but the monads do not interact ( only seem to ) by virtue of a pre established harmony.
14.
Instead, by virtue of the principle of pre-established harmony, each monad follows a preprogrammed set of " instructions " peculiar to itself, so that a monad " knows " what to do at each moment.
15.
Thus, Leibniz offered a new solution to the mind-matter interaction problem by positing a pre-established harmony between substances : the body is mere perceptions, which are all contained in a soul's complete concept.
16.
Mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance ( as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony ) or at the time ( as in the occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche ).
17.
Leibniz replied with his doctrine of pre-established harmony, which Jacquelot criticised on grounds of free will in a projected appendix to the " Conformit?", the " Syst�me abr�g?de l'�me et de la libert?".
18.
The doctrine of the pre-established harmony also loses its metaphysical significance ( while remaining an important heuristic device ), and the principle of sufficient reason is once more discarded in favor of the principle of contradiction which Wolff seeks to make the fundamental principle of philosophy.
19.
The historian E . R . Hughes suggests that Leibniz's ideas of " simple substance " and " pre-established harmony " were directly influenced by Confucianism, pointing to the fact that they were conceived during the period that he was reading " Confucius Sinarum Philosophus ".
20.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( who met Malebranche in Paris in about 1675 and corresponded with him thereafter ) also rejected the vision in God, and his theory of pre-established harmony was designed as a new alternative to occasionalism as well as to the more traditional theory of efficient causal interaction.
