I should perhaps begin with a clarificatory point about the title of this paper. I am not concerned here with Anne Conway and 'the' Monadology, referring to a particular well-known work of 1714 by G. W. Leibniz. Nor am I concerned, exactly, with Conway's monadology. Rather, I am concerned with the position she occupies, as a transmitter and developer of the idea that unity and being are identical, that to be is to be one, and that anything that is composite must therefore be metaphysically grounded in unities.

It might be somewhat non-traditional to include this final point about composition in a list of the typical aims of monadology. But monadology does not deny composite entities. Rather it explains them in terms of unity, or, to use Leibniz's well-known phrase, in terms of "diversity compensated by identity."[1] There are multiple currents flowing into this idea, perhaps the most influential among them being certain interpretations of the Neoplatonic tradition. Another important current is what is often called Christianized kabbalism, and more generally the Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century philosophy, particularly in Germany. The influence of this tradition on Leibniz has been studied in detail in a series of important works by Allison Coudert, and most notably her 1995 book, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.[2] Coudert positions her own view against that of Carolyn Merchant, who in a 1979 article[3] argued that Anne Conway was the principal transmitter of the concept of monad to Leibniz, while for her part Coudert considers that the most important source of the concept, and of the ensemble of kabbalistic ideas that go along with it, was the man Matthew Arnold would immortalize as 'the Scholar Gipsy' in an 1853 poem of that name: the alchemist, occultist, and all-around man of mystery, Francis Mercury van Helmont.

The hunt for the sources of Leibniz's core ideas, and the debate over whether they can be traced to Conway or not, has somewhat overshadowed the study of the development of Conway's own thought. It would be an understatement to observe that the kabbalist background to Conway has not been given adequate attention. In fact, in some instances it has been positively suppressed. In his abridged edition of Conway's posthumously published 1690 work, the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,[4] for example, Jonathan Bennett simply edits out all the references to kabbalah, or at least all that he believes he can edit out without obviously distorting or destroying Conway's arguments. But this is in truth an impossible task, for the Principles, taken at face value, could rightly be described as a commentary on Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata, a massive pastiche of a work published in two separate volumes, the first in 1677 in Sulzbach, and the second in Frankfurt in 1684.[5] But if serious scholarship has preferred to ignore Knorr von Rosenroth's contributions to the history of philosophy, the principal consequence of this negligence has been to embolden unserious scholars, spirit-seers as Kant would have called them, to consider it as their own text. To this day the most common English edition of The Kabbalah Unveiled is published by the Theosophical Society in an English translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the founder in 1891 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[6] He was preceded in his enthusiasm for Knorr von Rosenroth by the prominent 19th-century French adept of black magic, Éliphas Lévi.[7]

I am not proposing to take it back today, not exactly, though I am proposing that Conway was, herself, taken in by it, like it or not, just as Lévi and the theosophists were, and through Conway some of the core features of what we know as 'monadology' found their way to Leibniz. In this paper I would in particular like to consider why it is that Conway adopts certain views that will later be associated with Leibniz's theory of monads. I will take it for granted that this theory holds not only that being is unity, but also that there is unity in diversity. The former aspect of monadology is generally emphasized in what is anachronistically called the 'idealist' interpretation of Leibniz, while the latter aspect has pride of place in 'realist' renderings of his philosophy. To say that Leibniz is a 'realist' in this sense is to say that he is committed to a 'metaphysics of corporeal substance'. I have said as much in several other places, and have also provided arguments in those places that I will not repeat here.[8] What I will argue here is that, while the doctrine of the equivalence of being and unity has a plainly Platonic-Pythagorean pedigree, the theory of corporeal substance --which is again, not an alternative to the monadology, but rather a dimension of it-- may be traced in large part to authors associated with both Jewish and Christian kabbalism. It is this dimension of monadology that seems more plainly present in Conway, who may in turn have served as one of the sources for Leibniz's mature model of corporeal substance.

But what, to begin, is kabbalah? The short answer to this difficult question is that it is the tradition based on a supposed esoteric revelation that accompanied the exoteric revelation given by God to Moses.[9] The tradition has its roots as early as late antiquity, with the Sefir Yezirah or Book of Formation written sometime between the third and the sixth centuries. The Zohar or Book of Splendor would be composed in the 13th century, but would be commonly attributed to ancient authors. Kabbalism as a tradition entered its modern phase in the 16th century, with the work of Isaac Luria, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Jerusalem in 1534. The Lurianic Kabbalah, principally an interpretation of the Zohar, offered a philosophical, if cryptic, account of the creation of the world, of the personae of God, of the nature of man, of the reincarnation and immortality of the soul, among other, often heretical doctrines. It was via Luria that kabbalah made its entry into Christian thought in the following century. Luria incorporated elements of Gnosticism, particularly the view that each soul is a sort of spark or flame and that its embodiment is the result of imprisonment or exile. He was also, as Coudert emphasises, what might be called an 'animist'. "There was nothing dead and devoid of soul in the Lurianic universe," she explains, "Souls were in everything, including stones."[10]

The Christian appropriation of kabbalah has a history as intricate and multifaceted as kabbalah's Jewish origins. In part it resulted from a rise in millenarianism in both Judaism and Christianity in the century that saw tremendous sectarian violence in Western Europe as well as a shifting role, in Southeastern Europe and in the Levant, for Ottoman power. Thus the self-proclaimed messiah from Smyrna, Sabbatai Zevi both learned kabbalah from Lurianic sources, and took an interest in radical Protestant millenarian movements as far away as England.[11] And in fact this hybridism worked in both directions, with radical Protestant sects, most notably the Quakers (soon to be joined by both Conway and van Helmont) seeing Hebrew learning and Jewish theology as properly among the core concerns of a new, distinctly modern and consciously philosophical articulation of Christian faith.[12] Kabbalism was but one element of a broader Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century erudite circles, which variously saw Hebrew as the ideal language in its proximity to the original Adamic one (now lost), or saw it as the basis of an emerging discipline of Orientalist philology that would ground scriptural study in rigorous historical fact.

Christian Hebraizers were not necessarily philo-Semites. Many took a broadly typological approach to Jewish textual traditions, interpreting events of the Hebrew Bible as prefigurations of the Gospels. The prophetic powers of Old Testament personages also offered a way of incorporating pagan philosophers into the widened circle of Christianity. Thus in his Conjectura cabbalistica of 1653 Henry More declares that "it is generally acknowledged by Christians, that [Pythagoras and Plato] both had their philosophy from Moses.[13] More is fairly uninterested in Hebrew learning; he wrote his 'Cabbala' precisely as a conjecture, and seems to have done so mostly under pressure from Conway. For him kabbalah is nothing other than an interpretation given to 'the first chapters of Genesis'. More thus has his own kabbalah simply as a result of the application of his hermeneutic abilities to the text, but this is acknowledged to be something different from 'the Jewish Cabbala', which is "conceived to be a Traditional Doctrine or Exposition of the Pentateuch which Moses received from the mouth of God."

It may in part have been More's casual kabbalism that drove his closest intellectual peer, Anne Conway, to seek a deeper knowledge of it through a deepened association with van Helmont the younger, who would be invited to live in her home at Ragley Hall from 1671 until her death in 1679.[14] In a 1667 text entitled Short Sketch of the True Natural Alphabet of the Sacred Language,[15] the Flemish author acknowledges Henry More's 'philosophical and moral Cabbala' based on an interpretation of the first three books of Moses. One could stop with such an approach, he observes, if "the entire nature of all things did not at once signal to me and desire of for me her own sake to make it known that no other language in the world agrees with it so exactly as this one [biblical Hebrew]." Nothing shows this better, van Helmont adds, "than the example of our first father Adam, in giving the names to all the animals."[16]

More's interest in kabbalah is eclectic and fleeting, a bit sloppy, while van Helmont's is that of a passionate adept. Leibniz for his part would later synthesise the two of these, by bringing to bear the same rigorous eclecticism we are familiar with from so many of his areas of interest. Leibniz meets van Helmont for the first time in 1671, who in turn introduces him to Knorr von Rosenroth. A quarter century later and many years after Conway's death, Leibniz will spend significant time with van Helmont, in March and April, 1696, when the latter visits Hanover and discusses philosophy "with Leibniz and the Electress every morning at nine o'clock."[17] On Coudert's view, van Helmont had come to Hanover enthused by an idea he was calling by the name of 'monads', which were something like the primordial seeds of things. But, she claims, "Helmont's monadology remained little more than a 'metaphysical poem'; and it was Leibnitz's ambition to solve its many inherent contradictions."[18]

The general perception among Leibniz scholars has been that the philosopher took over the concept of monad --perhaps from a reading of Conway's work, perhaps from conversation with van Helmont-- without much regard for the more obscure or mystical dimensions of the cocncept's origins. Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil expresses this view clearly when he writes that kabbalah "was only an object of curiosity for [Leibniz], like many other imaginary curiosities of his time or of past centuries... This energetic thinker reduced all these doctrines to his own system, he only took what agreed with his own thought."[19] Coudert, as we have seen, argues that the influence of kabbalah on Leibniz is in fact significant, coming principally from his consultations with van Helmont at Hanover. Merchant, by contrast, "sees van Helmont's friend and patroness, Lady Anne Conway, as the real source of inspiration... [S]he argues that Leibniz derived the term monad not from van Helmont but from reading Anne Conway's one published book, The Principles."[20] The excluded possibility that Coudert does not seem to recognise here is that she and Merchant may both be partially correct: Leibniz may have been influenced by kabbalah, but may have got all he needed of it from Conway's book. After all, again, the Principles, unabridged, might well be described as a commentary on Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata.

Leibniz describes both Conway and van Helmont in a telling fashion in the New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704. He is not speaking explicitly of kabbalah, but rather of the doctrine of pananimism, which he supports but would like to see transformed into a rational and rigorous doctrine, and which, as we have seen and will see again, has at least partially a kabbalist pedigree. It is necessary, Leibniz writes, "to explain rationally those who have lodged life and perception in all things, as Cardan, Campanella, and better than they, the late Countess of Connaway, a Platonist, and our friend, the late Francis Mercury van Helmont (although elsewhere bristling with unintelligible paradoxes), with his friend the late Mr. Henry More."[21] Thus Conway gets pride of place among Leibniz's contemporaries as a defender of the pananimist doctrine; van Helmont deserves mention too, but also a slight reproach; Henry More, meanwhile, tags along. Elsewhere, in a letter to Thomas Burnett of 1697, Leibniz miantains that his own philosophical views "approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway," in view of the fact that they "hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes-- all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists."[22] Leibniz does not explicitly address kabbalah in either of these passages. But could his invocation of the view that there is life and perception in all things itself be an implicit acknowledgement of a broad debt to dimensions of kabbalistic thought as propounded by Conway?

The Kabbala denudata is referenced in seven of the nine chapters of Conway's treatise. It is cited as the authoritative source for the first sentence of the first chapter, that "God is a spirit, Light, and Life, infinitely Wise, Good, Just, Mighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Creator and Maker of all things, visible and invisible."[23] After this opening claim, Conway's reliance on Knorr von Rosenroth, as the principal source of authority for her own claims, does not let up. One thing worth noting here is that Conway did not need to cite a kabbalist source for a very general claim such as this one, which is something we might just as easily find in the Divine Names tradition, or in any number of other Christian authors. This gratuitous invocation of the Kabbala denudata strongly suggests that Conway's straightforward purpose in the Principles is to signal her affiliation with Christian kabbalism, not as an eclectic borrower from this tradition among others (as, say, Leibniz would be), but as a partisan.

Many other of Conway's references to the Kabbala denudata in fact concern features of that work that are distinct and specific to kabbalistic thought. These are often flagged by a contrast between what is generally held, and what 'the Hebrews' by contrast think, usually with at least an implicit affirmation of the latter. Thus in the Eighth Annotation to Chapter 1 she introduces the special 'Hebrew' understanding of 'person', which she holds does "not mean a singular Suppositum, but a Conception only, or kind of Representation, or Method of Consideration."[24] This philosophical understanding of 'person' reflects the broad view, whose genealogy Carlos Fraenkel has recently traced from the time of the Church Fathers through Spinoza, that Jesus Christ may be thought of as a person without necessarily being a human person, and may be assimilated to the all-pervading logos or reason of the perceptible world.[25] Conway for her part adopts the Christianized kabbalist view that the Adam Kadmon or 'primordial man' of the Hebrews is identical to Christ. "This Son of God," she writes in Chapter 2,

“the First Begotten of all Creatures, to wit, this Heavenly Adam, and Great Priest, as the Jewish Doctors call him, is properly a Medium between God and the Creatures. And that there is such a Middle Being, is as demonstrable as that there is a God; where is meant such a Being, which in its own Nature is indeed less than God, and yet greater and more excellent than all other Creatures; whence also for his Excellency he is properly called the Son of God. ... [T]his Son of God... is called by the Jews, Adam Kadmon.”[26]

It is this rationalisation of Christ, and the supposed basis of this move in Jewish tradition, that undergirds Conway's commitment to toleration, her view that 'Jews and Turks' have access to the same divine truths as do Christians, even if it is Christianity that gives these truths their clearest articulation.

It would not be mistaken to discern here a common spirit with Leibniz, who seems to have believed that there are no real disagreements, but only different manners of formulating commitment to the same truths: resolution of conflicts is really only ever disambiguation of terms. Yet it would be difficult to account in this way for the difference between Leibniz and Conway in their respective accounts of the concept of monad. Conway mentions monads only once in her treatise, and, when she does, what she has in mind are 'Physical Monades', which is to say what results from the physical division of things into their least parts.[27] Yet nothing can be more certain than that, for Leibniz, there are no least parts of things. There are only primordial elements from which things result, not in the way that houses result from bricks, but somewhat more in the way that illumination results from a flame. This difference speaks strongly in favor of Coudert's view, then, against Merchant, that Leibniz does not borrow the term directly from Conway, but presumably instead from his 9:00 AM philosophical dialogues with van Helmont at Hanover. If Leibniz had first encountered the term 'monad' in Conway's rendering of it, he would have rejected it outright.

Yet, again, we might do better to look for the roots of Conway's monadology not in her use of the term 'monad', but rather in that other dimension of the theory as we have come to know it in Leibniz's philosophy: the manner in which unity grounds diversity. In Chapter 7 of the Principles Conway writes that "the Body, sc. of a Man or Beast, is nothing else but an innumerable multitude of Bodies, compacted together in to one, and disposed into a certain order." This composite nature of the body is in turn reflected at the level of spirit: “the Spirit of a Man, or Beast,” she writes, “is a certain innumerable multitude of Spirits united together in the said Body, which have their Order and Government so, that there is one Captain, or Chief Governor, another a Lieutenant, and another hath a certain kind of Government under him, and so through the whole, as it is wont to be in an Army of Soldiers.”

The figure of the army (or, alternatively, the flock) is of course Leibniz's preferred metaphor for describing the true nature of the animal body. But Conway supplements this fairly obvious comparison by a significant biblical reference, in this case to the New Testament: a man or beast is multiple, just as "the Devil which possessed the Man was called Legion, because there were many of them; so that every Man; yea, every Creature, consists of many Spirits and Bodies." This is a reference to Christ's exorcism of the demons, most familiar from Mark 5:1-13, where he sends them out of the body of a Gerasene man and into a flock of pigs, which then rush away, jump in a lake, and drown.

Much could be said about the demonological and anthropological significance of the composite devil's response to Christ's question, "Who are you?" To reply, "Legion, for we are many," is at once to play with grammar, to move jauntily from the first-person singular to the plural, and is also, perhaps, to suggest that in ancient Near Eastern cultures the internal experience of multiplicity was seen as pathological and experienced as a form of demonic possession. But it was also a way of expressing the demon's (or demons') power: Legio was a common term for a Roman military formation. One way of understanding the metaphysics of composite substance, as eventually adopted by Leibniz, is that being 'legion' is simply the normal condition of beings, and that it is in virtue of this condition that beings derive their active power.

Conway, as is her habit, supplements the reference to the Gospels with mention of a term used 'by the Hebrews', namely, 'Nizzuzoth, or Sparks'. Just as the legion of beings constituting a composite may be thought of as soldiers in an army, they may also be thought of as a multitude of sparks all scintillating out of a common flame. Here Conway cites a component treatise of the Kabbala denudata entitled "Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum" ["Treatise on the Revolutions of Souls"], attributed by Knorr von Rosenroth to 'Jitzchak Lorjensis Germanus', i.e., Isaac Luria, but in fact written by the Syrian kabbalist Hayyim ben Joseph Vital (1542-1620). The author begins by describing the fates of various 'soul sparks' as a result of different sorts of transgression. "If indeed [the spark] revolves on account of some crime and misdeed," he writes,

“then it is necessary that it should revolve with a certain other concurrent spark and that it should be restituted by that spark. If indeed the first spark has sinned in doing those things on account of which bodies are wasted and pass away in death, so that no resurrection comes to pass out of death, then this spark, seeing that its body has perished, revolves on its own in a certain second body, which rises again in the resurrection of the dead with all the parts of the spark of the first body: indeed the first body perishes.”

Next the author goes on to explain that sparks that are in some sort of active relation with one another must arise from a common root [radix]:

“As moreover was explained above, many souls cannot revolve in one body unless they are from a single root. Now indeed you should know that although all the sparks from this root are able to revolve as one, nevertheless this revolution does not happen at once, but rather the nearer and more similar sparks come together with one another by turns... In the species moreover, if this perfect spark is within, it can arise that in it revolve the souls of its root: and according to the proportion of its perfection... There are moreover some sparks that are very close to the human, others that are more remote from it; others surround it from far off; and others surround the human more closely and clothe it. And all these things occur according to the works of this human.”[28]

A human being is 'clothed' by scintillating souls, and these are both the reflection of that human being's action and the phenomenal manifestation of his or her body. This, again, is the passage of the Kabbala denudata that Conway finds most useful in elucidating her own conception of the nature of composite substance.

Without wishing to hand out laurels or withhold them, it seems that while Conway and Leibniz both find inspiration in the image of nodes of spiritual activity coming together to form a single being, the English philosopher did little to remove this image from the realm of metaphor, while the German made it the central task of his philosophical project to systematically spell out how it is that composite substances are grounded in simple ones, in nodes of perception: which is to say in monads. Conway draws on kabbalism to imagine multiple souls as coming together in one, but she does little more to ground this view than to make observations on entities and processes given in sensory experience that seem to provide a model for how the metaphysics of composition might work: fire, water, alcohol, and so on. Nor does she see such composition, like Leibniz soon will, as grounded in monads, since what she thinks of as monads are not really monadic at all: they are, to use Leibniz's distinction, not really the atoms of substance or metaphysical atoms, but only the least parts of matter, and thus physical atoms in the traditional sense.

The composition of unified composite beings from subordinate individuals beings was at the center of a number of philosophical discussions in the 17th century. It shows up in political philosophy, for example, in the frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan. We see it imagined in the proto-science fiction of the era, as in Cyrano de Bergerac's vision of a composite creature that lives on the surface of the sun, coming together from the swarming of countless small birds, in his Les états et empires du Soleil of 1665. In debates about the metaphysics of individual substances, rather than of states or of fantastical creatures, there was considerable resistance to the possibility of several beings yielding up a single one. Thus in his True Intellectual System of the Universe of 1678, Ralph Cudworth complains that “to make every man and animal to be a multitude or commonwealth of percipients, and persons, as it were, clubbing together, is a thing so absurd and ridiculous, that one would wonder the hylozoists should not rather choose to recant that their fundamental error of the life of matter, than endeavour to seek shelter and sanctuary for the same, under such a pretence.”[29]

The intense disdain Cudworth expresses here testifies to the endurance of a much stronger default theory throughout the history of philosophy, associated perhaps most commonly, rightly or wrongly, with Aristotle, according to which one body should normally be expected to host no more than one substance. This might be a deep-seated folk-belief in Western thought, which would explain for example why colony organisms such as siphonophores are so commonly perceived even today to violate some unspoken rule of how nature is supposed to work.

In the 17th century the alternative view seems to have run as a sort of undercurrent, charged with some degree of danger and associated most closely with the tradition of chemical philosophy, as well as with mystical movements such as kabbalah. Paracelsus imagined that every organ has its own subordinate soul: the heart its cardianax, the stomach its gastrianax, and so on.[30] As William R. Newman has shown, a subterranean tradition of 'pluralism' existed alongside classical 'unitism', extending back to Arabic chemical sources, which appealed to subordinate and dominant forms as a way of accounting for the possibility of chemical processes such as the solution and reextraction of silver.[31] In these and sundry other cases, things aren't, or aren't only,what they appear to be: they contain multitudes, to speak with the self-contradicting poet, and both are and are not what they are.

In this paper I have attempted to isolate and focus on a particular chapter in the long history of thinking about nested individuals that extends, so to speak, from the Gospel of Mark to Walt Whitman. In the Bible this condition is represented as the very paradigm of abnormality: demonic possession; in the poet, it is our shared and universal condition. Conway and Leibniz stand at a pivotal moment in this history. Conway, emboldened by her reading of Christianized kabbalistic texts, embraced this pluralism and in so doing rejected a core commitment of mainstream philosophy. Leibniz, in turn, embraced the same view, and applied his rigor as best he could to make it mainstream. We still find siphonophores strange, but in the end we know there is no more well-founded metaphysical model of substance to tell us why such creatures should not exist. Natural beings, as a rule, contain multitudes. The recognition of this basic fact about the world is something that Conway helped to open up, mediating between the allusive mysticism of the kabbalah and the more systematic philosophical model of composite substance developed by Leibniz. It is here, in the study of the diversity within unity, that Leibniz's debt to Conway may be the greatest, rather than in his reception of the idea of the bare monad as an absolutely simple node of perception. This is a conception of the monad Conway did not have, and so could not share.

Works cited

Stuart Brown, "Leibniz and More's Cabbalistic Circle," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96.

Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].

Allison Coudert, "A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox's Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189.

Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985.

Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.

Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.

Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Alan Gabbey, "Anne Conway et Henry More," Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404.

M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687): Tercentenary Studies, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990.

Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.

G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60.

G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--.

Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l'étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.

Carolyn Merchant, "The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.

Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mysitical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653.

William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Richard H. Popkin, "Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story," Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.

Richard H. Popkin, "The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.

Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.

Justin E. H. Smith, "'Spirit Is a Stomach': The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz's Theory of Corporeal Substance," in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.

Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

--

[1] G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--, Reihe 6, Band 2, 283.

[2] Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. See also Allison Coudert, "A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox's Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189; Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.

[3] See Carolyn Merchant, "The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.

[4] Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].

[5] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.

[6] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.

[7] Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l'étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.

[8] See in particular Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

[9] See in particular Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.

[10] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.

[11] See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973; Richard H. Popkin, "Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story," Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.

[12] See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

[13] Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653, Preface, no page numbers. See also Stuart Brown, "Leibniz and More's Cabbalistic Circle," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96; Alan Gabbey, "Anne Conway et Henry More," Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404; Richard H. Popkin, "The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.

[14] See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[15] F. M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.

[16] Hellmont, Kurtzer Entwurff, no page numbers.

[17] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 38, 80.

[18] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ..

[19] Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.

[20] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ...

[21] Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, ...

[22] G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60, vol. 3, 217.

[23] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae," ch. 2, 6-7.

[24] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae," ch. 23.

[25] See Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

[26] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 1: 28, 30; 2: 33, 37; 3: 31-64, 37-38; Kabbala denudata II, 2: 244.

[27] Conway, Principles, Chapter 3, 9; Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 2, 310.

[28] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum," §§ 19-24, pgs. 267-68.

[29] Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London: Thomas Tegg, 1845 [1678], vol. 3, 406.

[30] See Justin E. H. Smith, "'Spirit Is a Stomach': The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz's Theory of Corporeal Substance," in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.

[31] William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.