and, in contrast to Bonnet, an evolutionary sense. Radishchev 

 wrote about what he called "the steps of being"^^ the fol- 

 lowing inspired words : 



Staring at everything, you see your environment is 

 alive. Direct your curiosity to what we consider 

 inanimate : from the stones where the power of 

 coupling seems to be clearly single, ... to man 

 whose composition is so skillful, in whom the elements 

 are represented in different compositions, in whom 

 all the influences which are known in nature work 

 together, an organization of the highest sense . . . 

 from stones to man the graduation is evident, which 

 deserves reverential amazement. The substance of the 

 steps is evident; the graduation is already known in 

 that all genera have little individuality, even though 

 they can confidently be distinguished one from the 

 other; the steps or graduation of ruby, iron, mercury, 

 and gold are homogenous or identical with aloe, tulip, 

 cedar, oak; these successions are in essence analogous 

 to butterfly, snake, eagle, lark, sheep, elephant, 

 man; the steps on which crystallization and mineraliza- 

 tion become the forces of plants, the steps on which 

 coral, lips, moss grow and are conceived, the steps 

 by which force the plants extend their energy into 

 other compositions, are transferred little by little 

 into an irritation and from that into sensitiveness.*' 



The most difficult, of course, is the question about the 

 rightful situation of man in one continuous line with other 

 living creatures. The acceptability of that does not cause 

 Radishchev any doubt. "The interior of man," he wrote, "is 

 homogenously identical with the interiors of animals." Reviewing 

 in this connection the structure of different systems of organs 



16. A(leksandr) N(ikolaevich) Radishchev talks not about the 

 stairs of creatures (echelle des etres) but about the 

 stairs of substance, stressing by this the materialistic 

 content . 



17. Radishchev, ON MAN, HIS DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY. 



A complete collected work, vol. 2, issued by the Academy 

 of Science, USSR, 1941, p. 110. 



136 



