In his conception of finite personality he recurs to something like the monadism of Leibnitz.
He was remotely a disciple of Schelling, learnt much from Herbart and Weisse, and decidedly rejected Hegel and the monadism of Lotze.
According to one alternative, which consistently flowed from the psychological idealism of Descartes, as well as from his own monadism, he suggested that bodies are real phenomena; phenomena, because they are aggregates of monads, which derive their unity only from appearing together to our perceptions; real phenomena well founded, because they result from real monads.
No realists, they came nearer to Spinozistic pantheism and to Leibnitzian monadism, but only on their idealistic side; for they would not allow that extension and body are different from thinking and mind.
Boscovich may be taken as an example of the purest monadism.
