PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE LEIBNITZ'S IDEAS. 47 



trism, erroneously extended to comprise the phenomena of 

 life, and against analysis pushed to extremes, as preached 

 by Condillac and applied by his school, demonstrate and 

 maintain vital forces in all their splendid independence of 

 action and simplicity that cannot be further simplified. No 

 doubt they exaggerate the weakness of mechanical ex- 

 planations, and the perils of analysis, and it would be an 

 error to suppose that later science has always pronounced 

 them right. But it has at least justified them in holding 

 the opinion advanced by Leibnitz in opposition to Des- 

 cartes, namely, that life is a higher force which involves 

 lower ones without dependence on them, that the organ- 

 ism is a system of energies in which not every thing takes 

 place mechanically, that the forces which act in animals 

 are essentially analogous to those which act in man, and 

 that they all, consubstantial with organized matter, can 

 come to act only in it and by it. It is thus that those two 

 great physicians at the same time destroyed the medico- 

 mechanics of Boerhaave and the animism of Stahl, and 

 made the way ready for Bichat. Neither does the same 

 recent science wholly confirm the conjectures risked by 

 Charles Bonnet, by Telliamed, and more lately by Delame- 

 therie, Lamarck, and Darwin, upon the connection of be- 

 ings, the origin and transformation of species, conjectures 

 of which Leibnitz had furnished the cautious outline ; yet 

 it would be unjust not to acknowledge that they have 

 aided in giving a strong impulse to zoological researches. 



So also Vicq-d'Azyr, and those other anatomists who 

 lay the foundation of comparative anatomy, and examine 

 the harmonious relations, the various connections, the dy- 

 namic adjustments of the organs, are faithful to the con- 

 ceptions formed by Leibnitz as to Nature's plans. Goethe, 

 who openly expressed his respect for Diderot, shows him- 

 self a follower of Leibnitz as well as of Spinoza, not only 

 in his works on comparative anatomy, in which he points 



