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19 On this view human beings are not puppets subject to physicallaws, and human actions are From Atomos to Corpuscles 43 directed by the individual; therefore, each person is free to decide how to act and is morally responsible. He or she would be called to account on the Day of Judgement. 20 ATOMICITY AND THE vom As indicated above Descartes' corpuscular theory - which in fact did much to revive atomism - is essentially self-contradictory since if matter is corpuscular, there must be space between the corpusdes.

Throughout the Middle Ages references to 'smallest parts' are references to minima, with changing properties, not to immutable atoms. 37 From Atomos to Corpuscles CORPUSCLES By the seventeenth century explanations of change in terms of Aristotelian matter and form were complex and involved and they were being severely criticised. Other Ancient Greek ideas were revived. In chapter 2 we saw that though Plato believed that a shadowy matter existed, he argued that ultima te reality was non-material.

The aggregates of monads made up what Leibniz called materia secunda. For any aggregate there was a dominant monad which had an especially active entelechy or soul, whereas the entelechy of other monads was relatively passive. '25 Thus, for Leibniz, an matter was, in asense, animate. 26 We need to bear in mind that Leibniz used the phrases materia prima and materia secunda in two different senses: a metaphysical and a phenomenal sense. 27 As we have seen, in the metaphysical sense the former was an element in the nature of every monad and the latter was an aggregate of monads with a dominant monad.