Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

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

Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.