42 NATURE AND LIFE. 
any specific differences between man and animals. He 
grants that they have a soul inferior to ours in being less 
rational, but still a rational soul, a soul fundamentally of 
the same essence as ours, a principle of activity quite other 
than the energies of the inorganic world. He considers it, 
moreover, equally indestructible and immortal with our 
own. Those, says Leibnitz, who conceive that an infinity 
of little living things exists in the smallest drop of water, 
as Leuwenhoeck’s experiments prove, and who do not think 
it strange that matter should be filled everywhere with ani- 
mated substances, will not think it strange either that 
there should be something animated in ashes, and that fire 
may transform a living being, may reduce it, instead of de- 
stroying it. Thus, life does not vanish. Only the arrange- 
ment and agreement of the monads are modified; the es- 
sences that compose them remain with their original and 
incorruptible properties, ready to reappear in other living 
things. That which never begins never perishes either. 
These reflections led Leibnitz to a very profound way of 
looking on the phenomenon of death. As life is not a 
breath coming suddenly and all at once to animate the 
body, death cannot be attributed to the sudden vanishing 
of such a breath. As generation is only the developing of 
an already-formed animal, corruption, or death, is only the 
enveloping of a living being which does not cease to re- 
main living. Death takes place by degrees; it attacks 
first the imperceptible parts, and does not strike our atten- 
tion until it has seized the whole being. And we do not 
see the gradual steps of that retrograding as we perceive 
those of the slow forward movement that constitutes birth. 
The facts of transformation and renewed life among insects, 
the return to life of men nearly frozen, drowned, or stran- 
gled, seem to Leibnitz a proof that death thus comes on 
by very slow degrees, and he advises medical science to 
attempt the task of bringing men to life again. Later 
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