42 NATURE AND LIFE. 



any specific differences between man and animals. He 

 grants that they have a soul inferior to ours in being less 

 rational, but still a rational soul, a soul fundamentally of 

 the same essence as ours, a principle of activity quite other 

 than the energies of the inorganic world. He considers it, 

 moreover, equally indestructible and immortal with our 

 own. Those, says Leibnitz, who conceive that an infinity 

 of little living things exists in the smallest drop of water, 

 as Leuwenhoeck's experiments prove, and who do not think 

 it strange that matter should be filled everywhere with ani- 

 mated substances, will not think it strange either that 

 there should be something animated in ashes, and that fire 

 may transform a living being, may reduce it, instead of de- 

 stroying it. Thus, life does not vanish. Only the arrange- 

 ment and agreement of the monads are modified ; the es- 

 sences that compose them remain with their original and 

 incorruptible properties, ready to reappear in other living 

 things. That which never begins never perishes either. 

 These reflections led Leibnitz to a very profound way of 

 looking on the phenomenon of death. As life is not a 

 breath coming suddenly and all at once to animate the 

 body, death cannot be attributed to the sudden vanishing 

 of such a breath. As generation is only the developing of 

 an already-formed animal, corruption, or death, is only the 

 enveloping of a living being which does not cease to re- 

 main living. Death takes place by degrees; it attacks 

 first the imperceptible parts, and does not strike our atten- 

 tion until it has seized the whole being. And we do not 

 see the gradual steps of that retrograding as we perceive 

 those of the slow forward movement that constitutes birth. 

 The facts of transformation and renewed life among insects, 

 the return to life of men nearly frozen, drowned, or stran- 

 gled, seem to Leibnitz a proof that death thus comes on 

 by very slow degrees, and he advises medical science to 

 attempt the task of bringing men to life again. Later 



