ABSTRACT
Leibniz, and many other philosophers, maintained the doctrine of the Identity of Indiscernibles, that if allegedly two things were alike in absolutely all respects without there being any differentiating feature between them at all, then they were not two things but just one and the same thing. Leibniz's doctrine of the Identity of Indiscernibles is very difficult to discuss. Every formulation seems to be inadequate, and both parties seem to have missed the point of the other's argument. Newton and Locke take the opposite course to Leibniz, and give as bare a description as possible of their fundamental substances. Their atoms or corpuscles or particles are thought of as things – material objects – rather than as persons, and things have no souls, no originality, to make each one itself alone. The Newtonian atoms cannot be shown to be different from one another in virtue of any qualities some do and some do not possess, for they all possess none.
