PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE—LEIBNITZ’S IDEAS. 47 
trism, erroneously extended to comprise the phenomena of 
life, and against analysis pushed to extremes, a8 preached 
by Condillac and applied by his school, demonstrate and 
maintain vital forces in all their splendid independence of 
action and simplicity that cannot be further simplified. No 
doubt they exaggerate the weakness of mechanical ex- 
planations, and the perils of analysis, and it would be an 
error to suppose that’ later science has always pronounced 
them right. But it has at least justified them in holding 
the opinion advanced by Leibnitz in opposition to Des- 
cartes, namely, that life is a higher force which involves 
lower ones without dependence on them, that the organ- 
ism is a system of energies in which not every thing takes 
place mechanically, that the forces which act in animals 
are essentially analogous to those which act in man, and 
that they all, consubstantial with organized matter, can 
come to act only in it and by it. It is thus that those two 
great physicians at the same time destroyed the medico- 
mechanics of Boerhaave and the animism of Stahl, and 
made the way ready for Bichat. Neither does the same 
recent science wholly confirm the conjectures risked by 
Charles Bonnet, by Telliamed, and more lately by Delamé- 
thérie, Lamarck, and Darwin, upon the connection of be- 
ings, the origin and transformation of species, conjectures 
of which Leibnitz had furnished the cautious outline; yet 
it would be unjust not to acknowledge that they have 
aided in giving a strong impulse to zoological researches. 
So also Vicq-d’Azyr, and those other anatomists who 
lay the foundation of comparative anatomy, and examine 
the harmonious relations, the various connections, the dy- 
namic adjustments of the organs, are faithful to the con- 
ceptions formed by Leibnitz as to Nature’s plans. Goethe, 
who openly expressed his respect for Diderot, shows him- 
self a follower of Leibnitz as well as of Spinoza, not only 
in his works on comparative anatomy, in which he points 
