"The German idealist philosophical tradition from which Hayek emerged is usually held to begin with Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote mostly during the second half of the seventeenth century. Leibniz put forward the idea of “monads,” a starkly idealist conception. Essentially, “each monad is a soul,” in the words of Bertrand Russell. Leibniz reversed the traditional conception of mind and matter by applying attributes of matter (in terms of sensory experience) to mind. Mind is what it experiences. Every mind or soul becomes an independent attribute of the universe, divinely ordered or arranged. Leibniz’s focus truly was mind. […] Leibniz was born at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Religious struggles, such as the Thirty Years’ War, are often protracted and intense because they concern fundamental individual beliefs and values to which compromise is not always applicable. Chaos and disorder reigned in the larger society from which Leibniz emerged. It is not surprising that his philosophy moved in the direction of mind from a strictly sociological perspective, for the world was too hard to bear."