By making the nature into material nature it became simple for Descartes
to discover the various laws of nature. which became the basis of the
development of modern science. However, as Descartes spit the mind away
from the nature, man became a reasoning substance and an extended
substance at the same time. Although Descartes explained the relationship of
two substance, in short, mind and body with the theory of the pineal gland,
it never obtained the full satisfaction of people and remained as a problem.
The task of Spinoza was to overcome this problem of Descartes, and his
solution was rather simple; to bring the mind back to the nature and make
the material nature into the nature that comprise both nature and mind. The
reason for Descartes to take the mind away from the nature and includes it
only to the man is because the free-will of human-spirit was contradictory to
the mechanistic naturalism. There was not a problem at all to include the
mind into the mechanistic nature since Spinoza denied the free-will by
regarding it as the imagination of delusion of human spirit. As a result, he
was able to maintain his opinion of one substance that is not separated into
mind and substance. And, the substance, according to his view of nature and
pantheism, is God. Meanwhile, Leibniz excludes the extension from the
simple substance, namely the nomad. He insisted that both Descartes and
Spinoza thought the extension as a simple concept that represents the
attribute of substance because there was not an attempt of detailed analysis.
Thus, as for Leibniz, monad -as a substance- can be defined as a spirit or
at least any form that has spirit in it. In this way, Leibniz tried to overcome
the problem of dualism by admitting only the variety of non-material
substances that has reasoning attribute.
This concept of substance had been criticized by the empiricists and, in
fact, disintegrated at philosophy. However, the problem of mind and body
has been discussed in earnest since Descartes. Also, its active discussion in
modern British and American philosophy is originated in Descartes' dualism
of substance-attribute. And, as Spinoza's body-mind identity theory has been
compared recently with the philosophy of mind in the 20th century, it is
suggested as one way to solve the body-mind problem. Deleuze's
philosophy, as he admits himself, is affected much from Spinoza's
substance-mode theory which views the world as constantly changing. And
the 20th century linguistic philosopher Chomsky evaluates Leibniz as the
one who grasped the genuine feature of language like himself. Also, there is
an evaluation that Leibniz's monadology was the pioneer of Russel's logical
atomism. Like this, the view of substance of modern rationalists not only
affected the various thought of modern philosophy, but also a repository of
modern philosophers' ideological origination.