current ideas, arrangements, aggregates, or groupings of the same universal matter, that is to say, of the same simple chemical bodies. It results from the preceding postulate that their activities can only differ in degree and form, and not fundamentally. There is no essential difference of nature between the activities of various categories of beings, no heterogeneity, no discontinuity. We may pass from one to another without coming to an hiatus or impassable gulf. The law of continuity thus appears as a simple consequence of the fundamental postulate. And so it is with the law of evolution, for evolution is merely continuity of action.
Such are the origins of the philosophical doctrine which universalizes life and extends it to all bodies in nature.
It may be remarked that this doctrine is not confined to any particular school or sect. Leibniz was by no means a materialist, and he endowed his mundane elements, his monads, not only with a sort of life, but even with a sort of soul. Father Boscovitch, Jesuit as he was, and professor in the college of Rome, did not deny to his indivisible points a kind of inferior vitality. St. Thomas, too, the angelical doctor, attributed, according to M. Gardair, to inanimate substances a certain kind of activity, inborn inclinations, and a real appetition towards certain acts.
