PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE—LEIBNITZ’S IDEAS. 49 
urged metaphysicians to empty spiritualism, and physicists 
to sophistical materialism. While knowledge of mind was 
thus wasting itself in literary declamation, and knowledge 
of Nature in desultory research, idle discussions multiplied, 
oftener inspired by passion than by reason, giving weapons 
to the least noble purposes that passion suggests, and 
paralyzing the most praiseworthy undertakings of reason. 
At the present time this state of things is disappearing, 
and Leibnitz’s philosophy, it seems, must be the strongest 
ally of all who long for a fruitful union between science 
and metaphysics. The highest minds in schools most 
widely apart give us grounds for indulging that hope. 
They do not rest satisfied with wishing for its fulfillment; 
they are laboring for that direct purpose, disregarding all 
impediments of prejudices or of objections. 
The result most clearly ascertained by vivisections in 
experimental physiology, and by observations in microsco- 
pic anatomy, mainly through the labors of Claude Bernard 
and Charles Robin, is, that living beings are agglomera- 
tions of infinitely fine and delicate particles, real individu- 
alities, each endowed with characteristic and consubstantial 
properties. These active units, forms and forces in one, 
bring about, following upon manifold interminglings, the 
whole organization and the whole working of animal and 
vegetable parts. Animals and plants have ceased to be 
machines vivified by a power distinct from them, which 
possesses and moves them; they are systems of combined 
monads in which life is deeply lodged, and by which it ex- 
presses itself—they are marvelously ordered collections of 
minute springs, possessing certain innate tendencies. As 
Leibnitz had said, every living being is made up of an in- 
finity of living beings. Now, these corpuscles, known to 
modern science as anatomical elements, have as their es- 
sential principle what Leibnitz described by the term 
“souls,” forms of substance, essential powers, monads. In 
