Leibniz’s conception of matter as dormant monads echoed Van Helmont’s and Conway’s organicism.

Evidence

Life and death, like activity and passivity, were reciprocal and interconvertible states of substance. Sleep, like death, was a diminution of perception in which the soul was like a simple monad. If perceptions were not activated, we would be continually in a state of stupor, like the naked monads. “When there is a large number of small perceptions with nothing to distinguish them we are stupified… . Death can produce this state in animals for a time.” These ideas are very close in language and in content to the younger Van Helmont’s view that matter is to spirit, as a dead man is to a living man—the same in substance, but dull, blind, resting and “in privation” and the passages from the Kabbalah Denudata referred to by Conway. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 989

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Von Helmont’s archeus clothed itself in matter as an inward generative workman — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 522; Anne Conway proposed monism whereby body is condensed spirit and spirit is volatile body — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 950; Anne Conway was the most rigorous vitalist critic of Cartesian mechanism. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 971 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Vitalists collapsed Cartesian mind-matter dualism into a monistic union #corroborates (0.82) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 932
• Leibniz defined an infinite number of unextended soul substances called monads. #expands (0.80) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2128
• Matter’s inherent spontaneity made activity primary in nature #expands (0.78) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 525