philosophy has distinct echoes of Platonic idealism – where the particular world around us is seen as an illusion reflecting an ultimate reality of ideal forms. But the new Cartesianism had shown how it was possible to base philosophic truth upon reason rather than on an unseen transcendent reality of ideas. Although Leibniz didn’t entirely agree with Descartes, he felt there was no going back to such an unscientific idealistic approach as Plato’s. Instead of Descartes’s mechanistic view of the world, Leibniz proposed a dynamic picture involving kinetic energy. As a result of Leibniz’s discovery of calculus, whose calculations involved diminishing values receding to the infinitesimally small, he came to see that things ultimately consisted of infinitesimally small points which had neither space nor time as attributes. These he would eventually call ‘monads’.
