d among minds, a spirit-atom among spirit-atoms.
What then constitutes its superiority or dominance, and makes it a mind
_par excellence_? Well, what constitutes the officer an officer? Two
things: a more developed mentality and the fact of being obeyed. In
military life these two factors are not always perfectly proportioned to
one another, but in the order of Leibniz's universe they are. A fuller
power to represent the universe is necessarily combined with dominance over
an organized troop of members; for the mind knows the universe only in so
far as the universe is expressed in its body. That is what the [24]
_finitude_ of the mind means. Only an infinite mind appreciates the whole
plurality of things in themselves; a finite mind perceives them in so far
as mirrored in the physical being of an organized body of members. The more
adequate the mirror, the more adequate the representation: the more highly
organized the body, the more developed the mind.

The developed mind has an elaborate body; but the least developed mind has
still some body, or it would lack any mirror whatever through which to
represent the world. This means, in effect, that Leibniz's system is not an
unmitigated spiritual atomism. For though the spiritual atoms, or monads,
are the ultimate constituents out of which nature is composed, they stand
composed together from the beginning in a minimal order which cannot be
broken up. Each monad, if it is to be anything at all, must be a continuing
finite representation of the universe, and to be that it must have a body,
that is to say, it must have other monads in a permanent relation of mutual
correspondence with it. And if you said to Leibniz, 'But surely any
physical body can be broken up, and this must mean the dissolution of the
organic relation between its monadical constituents,' he would take refuge
in the infinitesimal. The wonders revealed by that new miracle, the
microscope, suggested what the intrinsic divisibility of space itself
suggests--whatever organization is broken up, there will still be a minute
organization within each of the fragments which remains unbroken--and so
_ad infinitum_. You will never come down to loose monads, monads out of all
organization. You will never disembody the monads, and so remove their
representative power; you will only reduce their bodies and so impoverish
their representative power. In this sense no animal dies and no animal is
generated. Death is t