" Monadology spent the next two centuries on the ash-heap of intellectual history. After Leibniz’s death, a faulty version was published by one of his disciples, and its errors laid at Leibniz’s feet. Then it swam into the gunsights of Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant begins by saying a few complimentary things about Leibniz. Three hundred pages later, having carefully set his pieces out on the board, he annihilates Leibniz’s metaphysics in a few sentences. According to Kant’s philosophy, Leibniz is correct in thinking that space and time, cause and effect, are not ultimate realities, but rather constructs of mental activity. But by the same token, Kant says, the human mind is powerless to think in any useful or productive way about anything that is outside of space and time, cause and effect, and so Leibniz’s entire Monadology—or any thinking that attempts to transcend spatiotemporality—is rubbish. "

― Neal Stephenson , Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing