THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 99 
continuous movement. The clear perception of faint and 
commencing activities rising to the condition of harmonious 
systems, and unfolding into productive euergies, will be a 
complete revelation to it. This new mode of regarding | 
things, by which we set out from the small, the imperfect, 
and the relative, to reach the great, the perfect, and the 
absolute, will seem like a reminder of the philosophy of 
Leibnitz. The especial virtues of elementary corpuscles 
engendering a whole superior to them, by those very vir- 
tues, will recall to the mind his monadology. It will con- 
ceive of unity in combination and not in confusion. All 
that is and lives on the surface of our planet will rise be- 
fore it in distinct vision as the result of numberless and 
complicated groupings of simple phenomena, in which the 
consubstantiality of form and of force is manifest. “In 
eternal despair of knowing either the beginning or the 
end,” as Pascal says, the mind will be content with grasp- 
ing the most certain and defined appearances. By no 
means dogmatic, equally impotent to understand, in either 
case, in what way life and thought can proceed from an 
agoregation-of atoms, or from a supernatural cause, it will 
hold itself wisely balanced as regards these formidable 
problems. This, at least, is the last lesson and the posi- 
tive command of experimental science.’ 
Science has, at any rate, revealed many secrets to us. 
To show organic matter, shapeless and rudimentary in the 
blastemas, combining, organizing, evolving, and ordering 
itself in a thousand ways; to form by successive degrees 
anatomical elements, humors, tissues, and organs; to point 
out the elementary and irreducible properties, linking, 
mingling, working in, to effect by their spring the accom- 
plishment of the highest operations; to display the con- 
nection of all the acts taking place in the development of 
* The reader is reminded that this was written at the beginning of 
1870. Since then, my mind has found its way out of these uncertainties. 
