46 NATURE AND LIFE. 



true representative. At the first glance, that abounding 

 and undisciplined mind seems devoid of the qualities of 

 dogmatism and method which properly make the philoso- 

 pher ; but on a closer study we become aware that he did 

 develop an exact and settled system, in which the ideas 

 of Leibnitz hold a large place, and the principle of dyna- 

 mism, the notion of mother-forces, governs. In the " In- 

 terpretation of Nature," in " D'Alembert's Dream," and in 

 " Philosophical Truths as to Matter and Motion," Diderot 

 shows himself a pure scholar of the Hanoverian thinker, 

 rather a fanatical one even, since he goes so far as to write 

 that Leibnitz by himself alone gives as great a fame to 

 Germany as Plato, Aristotle, and Archimedes together 

 confer on Greece. Diderot's dynamism, by which we mean 

 his strong, full conviction of the activities of substance, 

 exists also in the minds of Charles Bonnet, of Buffon, of 

 Bordeu, and other famous naturalists of the same era. He 

 inspired at that period a whole school of investigators and 

 philosophers, some of whom found an excess of negations 

 in Hume's doctrine, and others an excess of analysis in 

 Condillac's system. 



Buffon, like Leibnitz, sees in Nature arranged plans, 

 continuous relations, regulated facts, ends everywhere fore- 

 seen, conforming to an order dictated by supreme control. 

 Those organic 'molecules and those penetrant forces (im- 

 manent) which in his view compose life, and go on from 

 one mould into another, to perpetuate it, are precisely 

 Leibnitz's monads. The great ideas unfolded in the 

 " Epochs of Nature," which, however disputable in some 

 points, have had so real an influence over the later advances 

 of geology, are for the most part borrowed from the " Pro- 

 toggea." Buffon's general physiology is not less similar to 

 that first pronounced by Leibnitz. Such is the fact also 

 as to those of two of his famous contemporaries. Bordeu 

 and Barthez, protesting at once against Cartesian geome- 



