 The history of Western metaphysics since Aristotle was mainly focused on elaborating various versions of substance metaphysics—in fact, as one might say with Hegel, “the history of [Western] metaphysics is the tendency towards substance.” However, interspersed in this history of substance metaphysics are pockets of process thought, partly as supplementary elements to an otherwise substance-geared theory, and partly as independent process-philosophical explorations. For example, the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (204–270) introduced the thought that the dynamicity of being is the “emanation of the divine.” Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Aristotle’s most famous commentator in the middle ages, kept some of the processual aspects of Aristotle’s scheme more clearly in view than later scholastics. Renaissance philosopher Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597) offered mereological descriptions of the diffusion of processes in order to develop a “metaphysics of light.” G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) devised a fully-fledged process-based metaphysics, postulating as basic individuals so-called “monads.” Monads are ordered sequences of states of affairs consisting of the co-exemplification of properties during some period of time. But monads are not static: they are endowed with an inherent “active force” that engenders the transitions between states. Moreover, since Leibniz took temporal relations to be “founded” in the properties of monads, states of monads are per se not temporally  discrete.[1]