THE MONADOLOGY 225 



them fall again into the Scholastic prejudice of souls 

 entirely separate [from bodies], and has even confirmed 

 ill-balanced 24 minds in the opinion that souls are mortal 25 . 



a silkworm in its cocoon, the resuscitation of drowned flies by 

 means of a dry powder sprinkled upon them (when they would 

 remain quite dead, if this were not done), the resuscitation of 

 swallows which make their winter quarters among the reeds, 

 where they are found without any appearance of life, the cases of 

 men frozen to death, drowned, or strangled, who have been brought 

 to life again ... all these things serve to confirm my opinion that 

 these different conditions differ only in degree, and if we have not 

 the means of bringing about resuscitation from death in other 

 forms, it is either because we do not know what ought to be done 

 or because, though we do know it, our hands, our instruments, and 

 our remedies cannot accomplish it, especially when dissolution 

 takes place too quickly and has gone too far. Accordingly we 

 must not content ourselves with the notions which the common 

 people may have about life and death, when we have both analogies 

 and (what is more) solid arguments which prove the contrary. 

 Lettre a Arnauld (1687) (G. ii. 123). 



2t E. reads mal touches ; G. and Boutroux, mal tournes. 



25 Descartes regards the immortality of the soul as ultimately 

 dependent on the will of God. See the Abrege prefixed to the 

 Meditations [Synopsis in Veitch's translation]. Cf. Eeponses aux 

 Deuxiemes Objections, 7. Leibniz thus criticizes the view of Descartes : 

 ' The immortality of the soul, as it is established by Descartes, is 

 of no use and can give us no kind of consolation. For, granting 

 that the soul is a substance and that no substance perishes, the 

 soul then will not be lost, as, indeed, nothing is lost in nature ; but, 

 like matter, the soul will change in appearance and, as the matter 

 of which a man is made has at other times belonged to plants and 

 animals, in the same way the soul may be immortal, indeed, but 

 it will pass through innumerable changes and will have no re- 

 collection of its former states. But this immortality without 

 recollection is ethically quite useless ; for it is inconsistent with 

 reward and punishment. What good, sir, would it do you to 

 become king of China, on condition that you forget what you have 

 been ? Would it not be the same as if God, at the moment He 

 destroyed you, were to create a king in China ? ' (G. iv. p. 300.) 

 From his own point of view, however, Descartes can say: 'Al- 

 though all the accidents of the mind be changed although, for 

 example, it think certain things, will others, and perceive others, 

 the mind itself does not vary with these changes ; while, on the 

 contrary, the human body is no longer the same if a change take 

 place in the form of any of its parts.' Abrege des Meditations. It 



