Quotes About Monads

Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.

Peyton Jones: I think probably the big changes in how I think about programming have been to do with monads and type systems. Compared to the early 80s, thinking about purely functional programming with relatively simple type systems, now I think about a mixture of purely functional, imperative, and concurrent programming mediated by monads.

He would point to some spot or other near the latrines. "There," he would say, pushing a bit of bread about inside his mouth, "on the sixth of February at five o'clock in the afternoon I began my memorable discussion with Professor K. on the ramifications of Leibniz's doctrine of monads in the thought of our day.

Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown inseparably connected with both philosophy and modern science. The gods of the ancients, the monads--from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz--and the atoms of the present materialistic school (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with spirit.

It follows from what we have just said, that the natural changes of monads come from an internal principle, since an external cause would be unable to influence their inner being.

Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.

observe the cascades of light that spread through the darkness of a cathedral, stirring within themselves a multitude of monads, seeds, indissoluble natures, drops of incense that exploded spontaneously, primordial atoms engaged in combat, battles, skirmishes by squadrons, amid numberless conjunctions and separations—obvious proof of the composition of this universe of ours, made of nothing but prime bodies teeming in the void.

But the arguments we had over free will and monads, while heated, were never as combatative as the ones we had over our marriage. I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn't exist.