AG NATURE AND. LIFE. 
true representative. At the first glance, that abounding 
and undisciplined mind seems devoid of the qualities of 
dogmatism and method which properly make the philoso- 
pher; but on a closer study we become aware that he did 
develop an exact and settled system, in which the ideas 
of Leibnitz hold a large place, and the principle of dyna- 
mism, the notion of mother-forces, governs. In the “ In- 
terpretation of Nature,” in “ D’Alembert’s Dream,” and in 
“¢ Philosophical Truths as to Matter and Motion,” Diderot 
shows himself a pure scholar of the Hanoverian thinker, 
rather a fanatical one even, since he goes so far as to write 
that Leibnitz by himself alone gives as great a fame to 
Germany as Plato, Aristotle, and Archimedes together 
confer on Greece. Diderot’s dynamism, by which we mean 
his strong, full conviction of the activities of substance, 
exists also in the minds of Charles Bonnet, of Buffon, of 
Bordeu, and other famous naturalists of the same era. He 
inspired at that period a whole school of investigators and 
philosophers, some of whom found an excess of negations 
in Hume’s doctrine, and others an excess of analysis in 
Condiilac’s system. 
Buffon, like Leibnitz, sees in Nature arranged plans, 
continuous relations, regulated facts, ends everywhere fore- 
seen, conforming to an order dictated by supreme control. 
Those organic molecules and those penetrant forces (im- 
manent) which in his view compose life, and go on from 
one mould into another, to perpetuate it, are precisely 
Leibnitz’s monads. The great ideas unfolded in the 
** Epochs of Nature,” which, however disputable in some 
points, have had so real an influence over the later advances 
of geology, are for the most part borrowed from the “ Pro- 
toga.” Buffon’s general physiology is not less similar to 
that first pronounced by Leibnitz. Such is the fact also 
as to those of two of his famous contemporaries. Bordeu 
and Barthez, protesting at once against Cartesian geome- 
