52 NATURE ALD LIFE. 
we reflect that every portion whatever of substance vir- 
tually contains some aspiration toward life, since it is ready’ 
to enter as a component part into the constitution of a liy- 
ing being, we may surely say that every thing lives. But 
if by that word we mean to express special energies, of 
the nature of nutrition, sensibility, and will, then we must 
acknowledge that life belongs only-to organized substances, 
that is, toa single category of monads. There no doubt 
is in the lowest monads, and those furthest removed from 
life, some dim tendency toward a determined order; but it 
seems to me erroneous, as yet, to view in this a conscious 
purpose. It is rather by a sort of reflex action that such 
monads exert their powers, under the influence of superior 
monads, exactly as the elements of the nerves, for instance, 
sometimes act on those of the muscles unwittingly to us, 
and in spite of us. 
Another question, and one not less graye, here arises. 
The thinking soul, as Leibnitz holds, is a dominant monad, 
a solitary monad. Science seems not to authorize such an 
assertion. For science, in its highest interpretation, the 
soul is a concurrent power of monads, all of them sentient 
and intelligent, but in different degrees, which accounts for 
the variations in degrees of feeling and of reason. In one 
living being there exists no monad expressing self, in an- 
other self is only very vaguely perceived, in another again 
it is conceived in its fullness. In one and the same living 
being the soul is evidently manifold, because it shows it- 
self under distinct aspects, as affection, feeling, intellect, 
will. ‘Thus, far from being single and indivisible, it con- 
sists of a combination of monads which are not all equally 
perfect, some being found occurring in the lowest animals, 
others being characteristic of man exclusively. An intri- 
cate system of primordial forces, a concordant action of 
energies without extension, expressing themselves in the 
anatomical elements of the gray matter of the brain, and 
a 
