sted activity, evil a
lesser good, confused ideas simply less distinct ones, animals men with
infinitely little reason, plants animals with vanishing consciousness,
fluidity a lower degree of solidity, etc. In the whole world similarity
and correspondence rule, and it is everywhere the same as here--between
apparent opposites there is a distinction in degree merely, and hence,
analogy. In the macrocosm of the universe things go on as in the microcosm
of the monad; every later state of the world is prefigured in the earlier,
etc. If, on the one side, the law of analogy follows as a consequence from
the law of continuity, on the other, we have the _principium (identitatis)
indiscernibilium_. As nature abhors gaps, so also it avoids the
superfluous. Every grade in the series must be represented, but none more
than once. There are no two things, no two events which are entirely alike.
If they were exactly alike they would not be two, but one. The distinction
between them is never merely numerical, nor merely local and temporal, but
always an intrinsic difference: each thing is distinguished from every
other by its peculiar nature. This law holds both for the truly real (the
monads) and for the phenomenal world--you will never find two leaves
exactly alike. By the law of the conservation of force, Leibnitz corrects
the Cartesian doctrine of the conservation of motion, and approaches the
point of view of the present day. According to Descartes it is the sum of
actual motions, which remains constant; according to Leibnitz, the sum of
the active forces; while, according to the modern theory, it is the sum of
the active and the latent or potential forces--a distinction, moreover, of
which Leibnitz himself made use.

We now turn from the formal framework of general laws, to the actual, to
that which, obeying these laws, constitutes the living content of the
world.

%2. The Organic World.%

A living being is a machine composed of an infinite number of organs. The
natural machines formed by God differ from the artificial machines made by
the hand of man, in that, down to their smallest parts, they consist of
machines. Organisms are complexes of monads, of which one, the soul, is
supreme, while the rest, which serve it, form its body. The dominant monad
is distinguished from those which surround it as its body by the greater
distinctness of its ideas. The supremacy of the soul-monad consists in this
one superior quality, that it