ALL NATUEE IS ANIMATE. 23 



Rome, on the ITtli of Feb., 1600, on the same day on 

 which, 36 years before, Galileo, his great fellow-countryman 

 and fellow-worker, was born. Such men, who live and die 

 for a great idea, are usually stigmatized as " materialists " ; 

 but their opponents, whose arguments were torture and the 

 stake, are praised as " spiritualists." 



By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled 

 to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that 

 a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate 

 organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure 

 of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general 

 way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical 

 process ; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, 

 or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the 

 extremely important conviction that all natural bodies 

 which are known to us are equally anmiated, that the 

 distinction which has been made between animate and 

 inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown 

 into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or 

 when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon 

 is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life 

 than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propaga- 

 tion of animals or the activity of their senses, than the 

 perception or the formation of thought in man. This 

 final triumph of the monistic conception of nature consti- 

 tutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of 

 Descent, as reformed by Darwin. 



