'But,' our common sense protests, 'it is too great a strain on our
credulity to make the real nature of things so utterly different from what
sense and science make of them. If the real universe is what you say it is,
why do our minds represent it to us as they do?' The philosopher's answer
is, 'Because they _represent_ it. According to the truth of things, each
monad is simply its own mental life, its own world-view, its own thoughts
and desires. To know things as they are would be simultaneously to live
over, as though from within and by a miracle of sympathy, the [25]
biographies of an infinite number of distinct monads. This is absolutely
impossible. Our senses represent the coexistent families of monads _in the
gross_, and therefore conventionally; what is in fact the mutual
representation of monads in ordered systems, is represented as the
mechanical interaction of spatially extended and material parts.' This does
not mean that science is overthrown. The physical world-view is in terms of
the convention of representation, but it is not, for all that, illusory. It
can, ideally, be made as true as it is capable of being. There is no reason
whatever for confusing the 'well-grounded seemings' of the apparent
physical world with the fantastic seemings of dream and hallucination.

So far the argument seems to draw whatever cogency it has from the
simplicity and naturalness of the notion of representation. The nature of
idea, it is assumed, is to represent plurality in a unified view. If idea
did not represent, it would not be idea. And since there _is_ idea (for our
minds at least exist and are made up of idea) there is representation. It
belongs to idea to represent, and since the whole world has now been
interpreted as a system of mutually representing ideations, or ideators, it
might seem that all their mutual relations are perfectly natural, a harmony
of agreement which could not be other than it is. But if so, why does
Leibniz keep saying that the harmony is _pre-established_, by special and