52 NATURE ALD LIFE. 



we reflect that every portion whatever of substance vir- 

 tually contains some aspiration toward life, since it is ready 

 to enter as a component part into the constitution of a liv- 

 ing being, we may surely say that every thing lives. But 

 if by that word we mean to express special energies, of 

 the nature of nutrition, sensibility, and will, then we must 

 acknowledge that life belongs only to organized substances, 

 that is, to a single category of monads. There no doubt 

 is in the lowest monads, and those furthest removed from 

 life, some dim tendency toward a determined order; but it 

 seems to me erroneous, as yet, to view in this a conscious 

 purpose. It is rather by a sort of reflex action that such 

 monads exert their powers, under the influence of superior 

 monads, exactly as the elements of the nerves, for instance, 

 sometimes act on those of the muscles unwittingly to us, 

 and in spite of us. 



Another question, and one not less grave, here arises. 

 The thinking soul, as Leibnitz holds, is a dominant monad, 

 a solitary monad. Science seems not to authorize such an 

 assertion. For science, in its highest interpretation, the 

 soul is a concurrent power of monads, all of them sentient 

 and intelligent, but in different degrees, which accounts for 

 the variations in degrees of feeling and of reason. In one 

 living being there exists no monad expressing self, in an- 

 other self is only very vaguely perceived, in another again 

 it is conceived in its fullness. In one and the same living 

 being the soul is evidently manifold, because it shows it- 

 self under distinct aspects, as affection, feeling, intellect, 

 will. Thus, far from being single and indivisible, it con- 

 sists of a combination of monads which are not all equally 

 perfect, some being found occurring in the lowest animals, 

 others being characteristic of man exclusively. An intri- 

 cate system of primordial forces, a concordant action of 

 energies without extension, expressing themselves in the 

 anatomical elements of the gray matter of the brain, and 



