We have already referred to the saying of Leibniz that the monad acts as if nothing existed but God and itself. The same idea is sometimes expressed by saying that God alone is the immediate or direct object of the monad. Both expressions mean that, while the monad excludes all other monads, such is not the case in its relation to God, but that it has an organic relation with him. We cannot keep from asking whether there is not another aspect of the contradiction here. How is it possible for the monad so to escape from its isolation that it can have communication with God more than with other substances? Or if it can have communication with God, why cannot it equally bear real relations of community with other monads? And the answer is found in Leibniz's contradictory conceptions of God. Of these conceptions there are at least three. When Leibniz is emphasizing his monadic theory, with its aspects of individuality and exclusion, God is conceived as the highest monad, as one in the series of monads, differing from the others only in the degree of its activity. He is the "monad of monads"; the most complete, active, and individualized of all. But it is evident that in this sense there can be no more intercourse between God and a monad than there is between one monad and another. Indeed, since God is _purus actus_ without any passivity, it may be said that there is, if possible, less communication in this case than in the others. He is, as Leibniz says, what a monad without matter would be, "a deserter from the general order." He is the acme of isolation. This, of course, is the extreme development of the "individual" side of Leibniz's doctrine, resulting in a most pronounced atomism. Leibniz seems dimly conscious of this difficulty, and thus by the side of this notion of God he puts another. According to it, God is the source of all monads. The monads are not created by a choice of the best of all possible worlds, as his official theology teaches, but are the radiations of his divinity. Writing to Bayle, Leibniz expresses himself as follows: "The nature of substance consists in an active force of definite character, from which phenomena proceed in orderly succession. This force was originally received by, and is indeed preserved to, every substance by the creator of all things, from whom all _actual forces or perfections emanate by a sort of continual creation_." And in his Monadology he says: All "the created or derived monads are the productions of God, and are born, as it were, _by the continual fulgurations of the divinity from instant to instant_, bounded by the receptivity of the creature to which it is essential to be limited." What has become of the doctrine of monads (although the word is retained) it would be difficult to say. There is certainly no individual distinction now between the created monads and God, and it is impossible to see why there should be individual distinctions between the various created monads.