Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/617

 604 CEITICAL NOTICES I theory recently elaborated by M. Burnouf in La Vie et la Pensee (see MIND xii. 302). In Prof. Delboeufs general speculation, however, the concep- tion of a " monad" as the basis of life and thought is not cha- racteristic. What is distinctive of his theory so far as it relates to the ultimate constitution of things, is his substitution of the atoms of Empedocles for the atoms of Democritus (p. 172). " The primordial elements of the universe are endowed with sensibility, intelligence and liberty." The primitive state, in which they wandered at hazard, is that which the poets have called " chaos ". It has only a hypothetical existence ; for, immediately after their birth, the elements collided with one another, and, affected in their sensibility, applied their intelligence and their liberty to flee disagreeable and to seek out agreeable encounters. Thus they created for themselves sympathies and antipathies, affinities and repugnances, loves and hatreds. They began to enter into unions with one another, sacrificing part of their liberty for the sake of relative peace, and forming " habits," which became the laws of the universe. Every sensation is the accompaniment of a pre- cipitation of the unstable into the stable. " Laws are the residues of acts primitively free." At first the elements were infinite in number, and each was infinitesimally different from all the rest. Insensibly this infinite primitive variety gave place to groups of substances capable of harmonising, and, among the groups formed, differences more and more profound manifested them- selves. Organic molecules were formed, and, in special agglo- merations of these, liberty, intelligence and sensibility became more and more concentrated. Every transformation ends by replacing the transformable by the untransformable. The exercise of life precipitates the un- stable into the stable, the living into the dead. Life, indeed, passes from body to body. Dead or relatively stable matter is transformed into living or relatively unstable matter; but this " is only possible at the expense of an inverse and greater preci- pitation of the unstable into the stable. With true corpses, if such there were, life could never be remade/' The evolution of the universe is therefore from absolute instability to absolute stability. Primitively, " every individual was a species," and there were no harmonising groups. When every particle of the universe has taken up a final position in relation to all the rest, there will be a single universal intelligence having clear con- sciousness of the whole universe as a single organism. This is the final term of the transformation of things. The law of " the fixation of force " from which Prof. Delboeuf draws the conclusion that the transformations of the universe must have a term is for him both a psychological and a physical law. Its physical expression is of course the law of the " dissipa- tion " or " degradation " of energy. The author has sought the solution of the problem of death, he tells us, "in that great law, the conquest of our century, according to which everything pre-