Glenn A. Hartz ocke's Essay is like a mail-order catalogue," writes PT Geach," and you buy what suits you. To switch to a communication-theory metaphor, the trouble is to make out which part is message and which is noise."'Something similar might be said of the Leib-nizian corpus. It is large and diverse and rich-so rich that there are within it tensions or outright contradictions. These force the commentator to choose which items to purchase and which to let well alone. Message and noise are alarmingly often set side by side in texts from the same or closely neighboring periods of time, in different drafts of the same essay, and sometimes in the very same draft.

When one turns to Leibniz's views of matter, one is confronted with an astonishing collection of distinct accounts. One must adopt either (i) the so-called" Athenian" approach, drumming out all of the incompatibility and presenting a single overarching inclusive account, or else (ii) the" Darwinian" strategy, saying his views of