It would be very misleading to imagine a monad as a separate entity trailing its slow way in a distinct path through the lower kingdoms, and after an incalculable series of transmigrations flowering into a human being; in short, that the monad of a Humboldt dates back to the monad of an atom of hornblende.  Instead of saying a mineral monad, the correcter phraseology in physical science which differentiates every atom, would of course have been to call it the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called the mineral kingdom.  Each atom or molecule of ordinary scientific hypotheses is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined to blossom as a man after aeons.  But it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy which itself has not yet become individualized:  a sequential manifestation of the one Universal Monas.  The ocean does not divide into its potential and constituent drops until the sweep of the life-impulse reaches the evolutionary stage of man-birth.  The tendency towards segregation into individual monads is gradual, and in the higher animals comes almost to the point.  The Peripatetics applied the word Monas to the whole Cosmos, in the pantheistic sense; and the Occultists while accepting this thought for convenience’ sake, distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the Concrete from the Abstract by terms of which the “Mineral Monad” is one.  The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit.  The “Monadic Essence” begins to imperceptibly differentiate in the vegetable kingdom.  As the monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation which constitutes properly the monad—­not the atomic aggregation which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and higher degrees of intelligence.

And though, as shown by those plants that are known as sensitives, there are a few among them that may be regarded as possessing that conscious perception which is called by Leibnitz apperception, while the rest are endowed but with that internal activity which may be called vegetable nerve-sensation (to call it perception would be wrong), yet even the vegetable monad is still the Monad in its second degree of awakening sensation.  Leibnitz came several times very near the truth, but defined the monadic evolution incorrectly and often greatly blundered.  There are seven kingdoms.  The first group comprises three degrees of elementals, or nascent centres of forces—­from the first stage of the differentiation of Mulaprakriti to its third degree—­i.e., from full unconsciousness to semi-perception; the second or higher group embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral kingdom thus forming the central or turning-point in the degrees of the “Monadic Essence”—­ considered as an Evoluting Energy.  Three stages in the elemental