distinct given mental worlds that harmony which constitutes their mutual
representation.

Our common-sense pluralistic thinking escapes from the need of the
pre-established harmony by distinguishing what we are from what we do. Let
the world be made up of a plurality of agents in a 'loose' order, with room
to manoeuvre and to adjust themselves to one another. Then, by good luck or
good management, through friction and disaster, by trial and error, by
accident or invention, they may work out for themselves a harmony of
_action_. There is no need for divine preordaining here. But on Leibniz's
view what the monads do is to represent, and what they are is
representation; there is no ultimate distinction between what they are and
what they do: all that they do belongs to what they are. The whole system
of action in each monad, which fits with such infinite complexity the
system of action in each other monad, is precisely the existence of that
monad, and apart from it the monad is not. The monads do not _achieve_ a
harmony, they _are_ a harmony, and therefore they are pre-established in
harmony.

Leibniz denied that he invoked God to intervene in nature, or that there
was anything arbitrary or artificial about his physical theology. He was
simply analysing nature and finding it to be a system of mutual
representation; he was analysing mutual representation and finding it to be
of its nature intrinsically pre-established, and therefore God-dependent.
He was not adding anything to mutual representation, he was just showing
what it necessarily contained or implied. At least he was doing nothing
worse than recognized scholastic practice. Scholastic Aristotelianism
explained all natural causality as response to stimulus, and then had to
postulate a stimulus which stimulated without being stimulated, and this
was God. Apart from this supreme and first stimulus nothing would in fact