CORRESPONDENCE WITH DES BOSSES
n.1. The formal aspect of a monad, or its principle of activity.
n.2. i.e. the physical matter of the world of experience.
n.3. i.e. the forms of the parts of the body of the first entelechy.
n.4. i.e. a ‘machine of nature’, or an organism considered apart from its form or principle of organisation, e.g. body as opposed to soul. It is contrasted with a ‘human machine’, which is a mere artefact, and not a natural organism.
n.5. This is Aristotelian terminology, written in Greek. The reference is to the qualitiless substrate in which a form inheres.
n.6. i.e. those that are observable in the physical world.
n.7. The theory that a father already contains the souls of all his future descendants.
n.8. i.e. philosophical problems about continuity.
n.9. i.e. if a physical object is not just a heap of monads, but a substance in its own right.
n.10. i.e. an accident which can move from one substance to another, as was required by the Catholic theory of transubstantiation.
n.11. i.e. the sensible qualities of the bread and wine.
n.12. i.e. in virtue of which a given set of monads constitutes a unitary substance.
n.13. Loemker (p.604) gloriously mistranslates this as ‘except as an extreme measure.’ The Latin is nisi ut extrema, and Loemker presumably confused this with the expression in extremis.
n.14. i.e. we still have perceptions of bread and wine after transubstantiation has taken place.
n.15. i.e. God has perceptions of Christ’s body.
n.16. And all their modifications are perceptions.
n.17. Reading albi for alibi.