Human experience starts, Leibniz says, "with the coarsest and most composite ideas" (13). But it does not take long for reason, or the nature of a reflective mind, to abstract from the composite conceptualization toward what Leibniz takes to be a fact, "that in the order of nature the simplest comes first, and that the reasons for particular truths rest wholly on the more general ones of which they are mere instances" (13). Leibniz argues that the extension of composite ideas into lived experience cannot be attribute of substance. That is because extension perforce involves multiplicity and plurality, or an aggregate of substances. Each single substance, on the other hand, must be regressively unextended, unitary, or in his term, simple. To arrive at the notion of a single substance he does the conceptual opposite of extending forward into experi ence. The simpler and less pluralistic or less aggregated substances are, the further back toward infinity the conception must progress, toward a preestablished cosmic harmony.
The mind's capacity for abstraction reifies this context in the form of a "simple substance" (177), called the monad, or a unitary reality that cannot be altered or divided in any way by any other force. Where alteration obtains, one does not have a monad but rather an "accident" of reality. When Leibniz says that "accidents cannot detach themselves from substances, or go about outside of them, as the 'sensible species of the School men [medieval Scholastics]
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