ALL NATURE IS ANIMATE. 23 
Rome, on the 17th of Feb., 1600, on the same day on 
which, 36 years before, Galileo, his great fellow-countryman 
and fellow-worker, was born. Such men, who live and die 
for a great idea, are usually stigmatized as “ materialists ” ; 
but their opponents, whose arguments were torture and the 
stake, are praised as “ spiritualists.” 
By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled 
to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that 
a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate 
organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure 
of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general 
way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical 
process ; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, 
or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the 
extremely important conviction that all natwral bodies 
which are known to us are equally animated, that the 
distinction which has been made between animate and 
inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown 
into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or 
when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon 
is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life 
than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propaga- 
tion of animals or the activity of their senses, than the 
perception or the formation of thought in. man. This 
final triumph of the monistic conception of nature consti- 
tutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of 
Descent, as reformed by Darwin. 
