Leibniz's Monadology and the Theory of Pre-Established Harmony

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a German polymath who served for decades as court librarian and counselor to the House of Brunswick at Hanover, and who independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s (in a discovery that occasioned a bitter and protracted priority dispute with Isaac Newton, formally adjudicated, in a biased proceeding, by a 1712 Royal Society committee effectively controlled by Newton himself), set out his mature metaphysics most concisely in the short treatise the Monadology, written in 1714, near the end of his life, and first published, in German translation, only in 1720, four years after his death. The Monadology presents reality as ultimately composed of monads — simple, partless, indivisible substances that are the true metaphysical atoms of nature, in explicit contrast to the extended, and therefore infinitely divisible, corpuscles or atoms of contemporary mechanist physics, which Leibniz regarded as merely well-founded phenomena rather than ultimate reality.