PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE—LEIBNITZ’S IDEAS. 51 
founded, the organic and the inorganic order, namely, and 
the more evident it becomes that the forces of life and 
those of a stone cannot be identified, even in their princi- 
ple. The monads that engender cells are higher than those 
that slumber in the grain of sand, just as the coarsest por- 
tion of an animal is otherwise and more intricately com- 
plex than the most perfect crystal. Very clearly, if form, 
personality, thought, memory, will, all that makes up the 
life of self, and the self of life, persists in identity, while 
the mattér of the organs suffers change and renewal, it 
must be because life consists in a system of activity essen- 
tially different from geometrical extension and from mass 
that has weight; it is because it is the peculiar property of 
a substance which involves physico-chemical action indeed, 
but involves besides that something quite different. 
Hvery monad, says Leibnitz, has its principle, its essence, 
its law, and is not made subject to the will of external im- 
pulses. This is the very basis of the doctrines as to life 
enounced by Charles Robin. Instead of granting that the 
body is ruled by a vital principle which coérdinates and 
guides physiological motions, he believes that, thanks to a 
complete concord in virtue of which every substance, obey- 
ing its own laws, assents to what other substances require, 
the effective working of the latter follows or attends the 
effective working of the former. The development of liy- 
ing beings, which consists in a progressive and ordered ac- 
cumulation of anatomical elements, is explained, as he avers, 
not by one force which holds them under its guidance, but 
by the successive coming into view, in some sort the revela- 
tion, of elementary substances which express life, every one 
of those substances duly appearing when the conditions 
needed for its manifest existence concur. 
But is life everywhere in the world, as Leibnitz insists ? 
Undoubtedly, if by life is to be understood spontaneity of 
all things, activity peculiar to each monad. Or again, when 
