Just as the world, in Leibniz's vision, consists of a network of relations, so anyone who attempts to think about the world discovers that their thoughts are imbedded in a network of the thoughts of other people, both past and present, so that most of the ideas that they may for a moment have mistakenly taken for their own were in fact only passing through, having traveled from mind to mind from some origin far in the past.

Lee Smolin, The life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, p.222