NEW SYSTEM 307 



ingly it is natural that an animal, having always been 

 living and organic (as some people of great penetration 

 are beginning to recognize), should likewise always re- 

 main so. And thus, since an animal has no first birth 

 or entirely new begetting [generation], it follows that it 

 will have no final extinction or complete death, in the 

 strict metaphysical sense, and that consequently, in 

 place of the transmigration of souls, there is nothing but 

 a transformation of one and the same animal, according 

 as its organs are differently enfolded [plies] and more or 

 less developed 41 . 



8. Nevertheless rational souls follow much higher 

 laws and are exempt from everything which could make 

 them lose the rank [la qualite] of citizens of the society 

 of spirits [esprits] ; God having provided for this so care- 

 fully that all the changes of matter cannot make them 

 lose the moral qualities of their personality. And it may 

 be said that everything tends to the perfection, not only 

 of the universe in general, but also of these created 



genuine substances continue to exist. By "genuine substances" 

 he appears to have meant only souls. But perhaps Democritus, 

 thorough atomist as he was, believed in the conservation of the 

 animal also. For he taught that there is resuscitation [reviviscence'], 

 as Pliny says of him : reviviscendi promissa Democrito vanitas, qui ipse 

 non revixit' [the false opinion of a coming to life again, put forth 

 by Democritus, who himself did not come to life again]. 'We 

 hardly know anything about this great man, except what has 

 been borrowed from him by Epicurus, who was not capable of 

 always taking his best things.' The words quoted from Pliny- 

 occur in his Historia Naturalis, bk. vii. cap. 55. (Sillig's ed., vol. ii. 

 p. 60.) 



u Monadology, 72 and 73. In the First Draft (G-. iv. 474) 

 Leibniz writes : ' As the minuteness of organic bodies may be 

 infinite (which may be seen from the fact that their seeds, enclosed 

 in one another, contain enfolded a continual succession of organized 

 and animate bodies), it is easily seen that even fire, which is 

 the most penetrating and violent agent, will not destroy an 

 animal, since it will at most reduce it to such a smallness that 

 fire can no longer act upon it/ In the correspondence with 

 Arnauld, to which Leibniz refers in i of the New System, Arnauld 

 had asked (as an objection to Leibniz's theory of the indestruc- 

 tibility of animals) what became of the ram which Abraham 

 sacrificed in place of Isaac. The foregoing passage contains in 

 brief Leibniz's answer. 



X 2 



