UNIVERSAL LIFE. _^ 245 



beings — a trace, as it were, of their sensibility. To 

 them reactions of matter indicate the existence of a 

 kind of liedonic consciousness — i.e., a consciousness 

 reduced simply to a distinction between comfort and 

 discomfort, a desire for good and repulsion from evil, 

 which they suppose to be the universal principle of all 

 activity. This was the view held by Empedocles in 

 antiquity; it was that of Diderot, of Cabanis, and, in 

 general, of the modern materialistic school, eager to 

 find, even in the lowest representatives of the 

 inorganic world, the first traces of the vitality and 

 intellectual life which blossom out at the top of the 

 scale in the living world. 



Similar ideas are clearly seen in the early history of 

 all natural sciences. It was this same principle of 

 appetition, or of love and of repulsion or hate that, 

 under the names of affinity, selection, and incom- 

 patibility, was thought to direct the transformations of 

 bodies when chemistry first began ; when Boerhaave, 

 for example, compared chemical combinations to 

 voluntary and conscious alliances, in which the 

 respective' elements, drawn together by sympathy, 

 contracted appropriate marriages. 



General Principle of the Homogeneity of the Complex 

 and its Components. — The assimilation of brute bodies 

 to living bodies, and of the inorganic kingdom to the 

 organic, was, in the mind of these philosophers, the 

 natural consequence of positing a priori the principles 

 of continuity and evolution. There is, however, a 

 principle underlying these principles. This principle 

 is not expressed explicitly by the philosophers; it is 

 not formulated in precise terms, but is more or less 

 unconsciously implied ; it is everywhere applied. It, 

 however, may be clearly seen behind the apparatus of 



