>Can you elaborate a little more on what Leibniz had to say about the Universe?
He essentially believed that reality came in two flavors: absolute and relative.
And each flavor of reality has its own flavor of causality (space, matter, and time).
Newton sort of beleived this too, but he beleived that the object of science is absolute reality.
Leibniz, on the other hand, said that the time and space and matter of science cannot be absolutes. They are components of a purely relational system.
On the other hand, absolute reality did have a type of matter, space, and time, but they are different from that studied by science.
The matter in this absolute reality is called a monad, the simplest substance. He said in his Monadology:
"22. In the natural course of events, every present state of a simple substance is the consequence of its preceding state; and similarly its present state is pregnant with the future."
If the monads are laden with all of the past, and contain all of the future, this is meant to say that it is perfectly determinate.
But, I remind you, monads are distinctly different from atomic matter:
Atomic matter exists in the physical/phenomenal realm; monads lie in the deep metaphysical realm, hidden from the physical/phenomenal world.
He described the monads as having the ability to "unfold", and partially reveal themselves in our physical/phenomenal world.
The key word here is partial; the key concept is that while all past and future is held within the metaphysical matter (monads), it is lacking in the physical/phenomenal matter (atoms and particles).
Thus, physical/phenomenal matter is indeterminate.
This is the best resource on Leibniz I've found:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/leib-met.htmSections 7, 8 and 9 contain the information most relevant to this topic.
