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 CHAPTER I.

UNIVERSAL LIFE. OPINIONS OF PHILOSOPHERS AND POETS.

§ 1. Primitive beliefs; the ideas of poets.—§ 2. Opinions of philosophers—Transition from brute to living bodies—The principle of continuity: continuity by transition: continuity by summation—Ideas of philosophers as to sensibility and consciousness in brute bodies—The general principle of homogeneity—The principle of continuity as a consequence of the principle of homogeneity.

The teaching of science as to the analogies between brute bodies and living bodies accords with the conceptions of the philosophers and the fancies of the poets. The ancients held that all bodies in nature were the constituent parts of a universal organism, the macrocosm, which they compared to the human microcosm. They attributed to it a principle of action, the psyche, analogous to the vital principle, and this psyche directed phenomena; and also an intelligent principle, the nous, analogous to the soul, and the nous served for the comprehension of phenomena. This universal life and this universal soul played an important part in their metaphysical systems.