For Leibniz, at the most fundamental level, reality is characterized by simple substances, or “monads”, a term that Leibniz picked up from Francis Mercury van Helmont and Anne Conway in 1696 (Merchant 1979). Since there are composites, Leibniz argued, there must be simple substances that, together, constitute these composites. Being simple, monads have neither parts, nor extension, nor form, nor divisibility. Leibniz saw them as the “true Atoms of nature”. While Leibniz thus retained a strong co