THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 99 



continuous movement. The clear perception of faint and 

 commencing activities rising to the condition of harmonious 

 systems, and unfolding into productive energies, will be a 

 complete revelation to it. This new mode of regarding 

 things, by which we set out from the small, the imperfect, 

 and the relative, to reach the great, the perfect, and the 

 absolute, will seem like a reminder of the philosophy of 

 Leibnitz. The especial virtues of elementary corpuscles 

 engendering a whole superior to them, by those very vir- 

 tues, will recall to the mind his monadology. It will con- 

 ceive of unity in combination and not in confusion. All 

 that is and lives on the surface of our planet will rise be- 

 fore it in distinct vision as the result of numberless and 

 complicated groupings of simple phenomena, in which the 

 consubstantiality of form and of force is manifest. " In 

 eternal despair of knowing either the beginning or the 

 end," as Pascal says, the mind will be content with grasp- 

 ing the most certain and defined appearances. By no 

 means dogmatic, equally impotent to understand, in either 

 case, in what way life and thought can proceed from an 

 aggregation of atoms, or from a supernatural cause, it will 

 hold itself wisely balanced as regards these formidable 

 problems. This, at least, is the last lesson and the posi- 

 tive command of experimental science. 1 



Science has, at any rate, revealed many secrets to us. 

 To show organic matter, shapeless and rudimentary in the 

 blastemas, combining, organizing, evolving, and ordering 

 itself in a thousand ways ; to form by successive degrees 

 anatomical elements, humors, tissues, and organs ; to point 

 out the elementary and irreducible properties, linking, 

 mingling, working in, to effect by their spring the accom- 

 plishment of the highest operations ; to display the con- 

 nection of all the acts taking place in the development of 



1 The reader is reminded that this was written at the beginning of 

 1870. Since then, my miud has found its way out of these uncertainties. 



