Everything in nature is organized; there are no soulless bodies, no dead matter.  The smallest particle of dust is peopled with a multitude of living beings and the tiniest drop of water swarms with organisms:  every portion of matter may be compared to a pond filled with fish or a garden full of plants.  This denial of the inorganic does not release our philosopher from the duty of explaining its apparent existence.  If we thoughtfully consider bodies, we perceive that there is nothing lifeless and non-representative.  But the phenomenon of extended mass arises for our confused sensuous perception, which perceives the monads composing a body together and regards them as a continuous unity.  Body exists only as a confused idea in the feeling subject; since, nevertheless, a reality without the mind, namely, an immaterial monad-aggregate, corresponds to it, the phenomenon of body is a well-founded one (phenomenon bene fundatum).  As matter is merely something present in sensation or confused representation, so space and time are also nothing real, neither substances nor properties, but only ideal things—­the former the order of coexistences, the latter the order of successions.

If there are no soulless bodies, there are also no bodiless souls; the soul is always joined with an aggregate of subordinate monads, though not always with the same ones.  Single monads are constantly passing into its body, or into its service, while others are passing out; it is involved in a continuous process of bodily transformation.  Usually the change goes on slowly and with a constant replacement of the parts thrown off.  If it takes place quickly men call it birth or death.  Actual death there is as little as there is an actual genesis; not the soul only, but every living thing is imperishable.  Death is decrease and involution, birth increase and evolution.  The dying creature loses only a portion of its bodily machine and so returns to the slumberous or germinal condition of “involution”, in which it existed before birth, and from which it was aroused through conception to development.  Pre-existence as well as post-existence must be conceded both to animals and to men.  Leuwenhoek’s discovery of the spermatozoa furnished a welcome confirmation for this doctrine, that all individuals have existed since the beginning of the world, at least as preformed germs.  The immortality of man, conformably to his superior dignity, differs from the continued existence of all monads, in that after his death he retains memory and the consciousness of his moral personality.

%3.  Man:  Cognition and Volition.%