PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE LEIBNITZ'S IDEAS. 51 



founded, the organic and the inorganic order, namely, and 

 the more evident it becomes that the forces of life and 

 those of a stone cannot be identified, even in their princi- 

 ple. The monads that engender cells are higher than those 

 that slumber in the grain of sand, just as the coarsest por- 

 tion of an animal is otherwise and more intricately com- 

 plex than the most perfect crystal. Very clearly, if form, 

 personality, thought, memory, will, all that makes up the 

 life of self, and the self of life, persists in identity, while 

 the matter of the organs suffers change and renewal, it 

 must be because life consists in a system of activity essen- 

 tially different from geometrical extension and from mass 

 that has weight ; it is because it is the peculiar property of 

 a substance which involves physico-chemical action indeed, 

 but involves besides that something quite different. 



Every monad, says Leibnitz, has its principle, its essence, 

 its law, and is not made subject to the will of external im- 

 pulses. This is the very basis of the doctrines as to life 

 enounced by Charles Robin. Instead of granting that the 

 body is ruled by a vital principle which, coordinates and 

 guides physiological motions, he believes that, thanks to a 

 complete concord in virtue of which every substance, obey- 

 ing its own laws, assents to what other substances require, 

 the effective working of the latter follows or attends the 

 effective working of the former. The development of liv- 

 ing beings, which consists in a progressive and ordered ac- 

 cumulation of anatomical elements, is explained, as he avers, 

 not by one force which holds them under its guidance, but 

 by the successive coming into view, in some sort the revela- 

 tion, of elementary substances which express life, every one 

 of those substances duly appearing when the conditions 

 needed for its manifest existence concur. 



But is life everywhere in the world, as Leibnitz insists ? 

 Undoubtedly, if by life is to be understood spontaneity of 

 all things, activity peculiar to each monad. Or again, when 



