2 5 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It remains to point out that the embryological doctrines of Mau- 

 pertuis were intimately connected with certain metaphysical con- 

 ceptions, of a type that has often since shown itself to be peculiarly 

 congenial to minds trained in biology. The 'Systeme de la Nature' 

 is primarily an exposition and a defense of the theory that all matter 

 possesses some sort of consciousness — a 'monism' similar to that of 

 which Haeckel is the contemporary prophet. A purely mechanistic 

 materialism, such as the atomism of the Epicureans, or the crude 

 notions which La Mettrie had recently put forward, seemed to Mau- 

 pertuis an evident absurdity; 'in order to overthrow such a system,' 

 he writes, 'one need do no more than ask those who hold it how it 

 would be possible for atoms without intelligence to produce an intelli- 

 gence.' Mere mechanism appeared as little capable of explaining the 

 phenomena of organic life, as it was of explaining the phenomena of 

 consciousness; especially manifest, Maupertuis thought, is the inade- 

 quacy of purely mechanical causes to account for the processes which 

 he conceived to be involved in the formation of the embryo. "A blind 

 attraction uniformly distributed throughout all particles of matter 

 can not serve to explain how these particles arrange themselves to form 

 even the simplest of organized bodies. If they all have the same 

 tendency, the same power, to unite with one another, why is it that 

 certain elements go to form the eye, certain others to form the ear, etc. ? 

 Why this marvelous arrangement ? Why is it that the various elements 

 are not united pell-mell?" The combination of material particles to 

 form a living organism seemed to imply a principle of selection, a 

 species of elective affinity between the particles, which could not be 

 reduced to physical or chemical categories; and the singular fact of 

 heredity, the transmission of qualitative similarities from one organism 

 to another through whatever minute bodies serve as the vehicles of 

 heredity, seemed to imply the possession by those bodies of something 

 which could only be conceived under the analogy of conscious memory. 

 It is necessary, then, to attribute to each particle of matter the pos- 

 session of some rudimentary forms of sentiency, memory and volition. 

 (Si Von vent dire sur cela quelque chose qu'on congoive, quoiqu'encore 

 on ne le congoive que sur quelque analogie, il faut avoir recours a 

 quelque principe d 'intelligence, a quelque chose de sembldble a ce que 

 nous appellons desir, aversion, memoire). Maupertuis does not forget 

 the radical difficulty which has been urged against the identification 

 of the res cogitans and the res extensa ever since Descartes — the diffi- 

 culty, namely, that the attributes of consciousness and extension have 

 nothing in common, and that neither can thought be conceived as ex- 



of generation appeared earlier than that of Maupertuis, which is not the case. 

 The general conception of the ' evolution movement ' and of the relative impor- 

 tance of its several eighteenth century representatives, in Professor Oshorn's 

 book, seems to the present writer decidedly misleading. 



