remains--it is purely arbitrary, after all, that a unitary consciousness
should be attached to, and represent, a mechanical collection of things
which happen to interact in a sort of pattern. If there is a consciousness
attached to human bodies, then why not to systems of clockwork? If the body
is _represented_ as unity, it must surely be because it _is_ unity, as the
old philosophy had held. But how can we reintroduce unity into the body
without reintroducing substantial form, and destroying the mechanistical
plurality which the new science demanded?

It is at this point that Leibniz produces the speculative postulate of his
system. Why not reverse the relation, and make the members represent the
mind as the mind represents the members? For then the unity of person
represented in the mind will become something actual in the members also.

Representation appears to common sense to be a one-way sort of traffic. If
my mind represents my bodily members, something happens to my mind, for it
becomes a representation of such members in such a state; but nothing
happens to the members by their being so represented in the mind. The [22]
mental representation obeys the bodily facts; the bodily facts do not obey
the mental representation. It seems nonsense to say that my members obey my
mind _because_ they are mirrored in it. And yet my members do obey my mind,
or at least common sense supposes so. Sometimes my mind, instead of
representing the state my members are in, represents a state which it
intends that they shall be in, for example, that my hand should go through
the motion of writing these words. And my hand obeys; its action becomes
the moving diagram of my thought, my thought is represented or expressed in
the manual act. Here the relation of mind and members appears to be
reversed: instead of its representing them, they represent it. With this
representation it is the opposite of what it was with the other. By the
members' being represented in the mind, something happened to the mind, and