THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
275 
distinct support, though the late Clarke Maxwell, in an excellent 
monograph 8 on the subject, felt compelled from his position as a 
physicist, to regard it as a speculation not in anyway sustained 
by our actual knowledge of the behaviour of molecules. 
Another solution of this class is that associated with the name 
of Leibnitz. According to him the clue to the existence of Life, 
as also to Thought, is to be found in the original constitution of 
the universe. Eesolved into the last analysis all things are 
monads — units of being. These ultimate monads vary in their 
power. Their essential nature is activity, or as we in modern 
phrase would say, using the term generally, energy. The variation 
of their power is a variation in degree of perception. The lowest 
kind of monads are those whose perceptive activity is at zero ; 
their sensitiveness is practically nil. An organism is a congeries 
of monads forming system within system. Every portion of 
what we call matter is a combination virtually of lives in their 
most infinitesimal form. "Every portion of matter," he says, 
" may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pool 
stocked with fish. Moreover every branch of the plant, and 
every part (membre) of the animal, and every drop of the 
liquid in the pool is, also, such a garden, and such a pool. 
. . . There is nothing crude, sterile, or dead, in the universe; 
no chaos, no confusion, save in appearance. . . . Thus it is that 
each living organism has a dominant entelechie (monad) which is 
the soul in the animal, and also that each of its limbs is full of 
other living things, plants and animals, every one of which also 
has its dominant entelechie (monad) or soul." 9 Taking such a 
view of the original constitution of things, and holding, as he 
did, the principle of Continuity, long before it was formulated by 
Sir W. Grove, he regarded the beginning of Life, in the first 
instance, as the emergence into organic form of sensitive units 
that contributed each its part to the ordered action of a particular 
system. 
Such a speculation seems to recognise creation, in the strict 
sense, as once for all in the beginning of all things, and all after- 
wards as the continuous modification of the relation of the con- 
stituents of the universe. In such a case, Life in organisms 
would indeed be a "coordination of actions," only the actions 
8 See Life. 
9 Monadologie, Paris edition, pp. 67-70. 
