Life and death

by A. Dastre

This is another consequence of the teaching of Leibniz. For, according to his philosophical theory, individual consciousness, like individual life, is the collective expression of a multitude of elementary lives or consciousnesses. These elements are inappreciable because of their low degree, and the real phenomenon is found in the sum, or rather the integral, of all these insensible effects. The elementary consciousnesses are harmonized, unified, integrated into a result that becomes manifest, just as “the sounds of the waves, not one of which would be heard if by itself, yet, when united together and perceived at the same instant, become the resounding voice of the ocean.”

Ideas of the Philosophers as to Sensibility and Consciousness in Brute Bodies.—The philosophers have gone still further in the way of analogies, and have recognized in the play of the forces of brute matter, particularly in the play of chemical forces, a mere rudiment of the appetitions and tendencies that regulate, as they believe, the functional activity of living beings—a trace, as it were, of their sensibility. To them reactions of matter indicate the existence of a kind of hedonic consciousness—i.e., a consciousness reduced simply to a distinction between comfort and discomfort, a desire for good and repulsion from evil, which they suppose to be the universal principle of all activity. This was the view held by Empedocles in antiquity; it was that of Diderot, of Cabanis, and, in general, of the modern materialistic school, eager to find, even in the lowest representatives of the inorganic world, the first traces of the vitality and intellectual life which blossom out at the top of the scale in the living world.

Similar ideas are clearly seen in the early history of all natural sciences. It was this same principle of appetition, or of love and of repulsion or hate that, under the names of affinity, selection, and incompatibility, was thought to direct the transformations of bodies when chemistry first began; when Boerhaave, for example, compared chemical combinations to voluntary and conscious alliances, in which the respective elements, drawn together by sympathy, contracted appropriate marriages.

General Principle of the Homogeneity of the Complex and its Components.—The assimilation of brute bodies to living bodies, and of the inorganic kingdom to the organic, was, in the mind of these philosophers, the natural consequence of positing a priori the principles of continuity and evolution. There is, however, a principle underlying these principles. This principle is not expressed explicitly by the philosophers; it is not formulated in precise terms, but is more or less unconsciously implied; it is everywhere applied. It, however, may be clearly seen behind the apparatus of philosophical argument It is the assertion that no arrangement or combination of elements can put forth any new activity essentially different from the activities of the elements of which it is composed. Man is living clay, say Diderot and Cabanis; and, on the other hand, he is a thinking being. As it is impossible to produce that which thinks from that which does not think, the clay must possess a rudiment of thought. But is there not another alternative? May not the new phenomenon, thought, be the effect of the arrangement of this clay? If we exclude this alternative, we must then consider arrangement and organization as incapable of producing in arranged and organized matter a new property different from that which it presented before such arrangement. Living protoplasm, says another, is merely an assemblage of brute elements; “these brute elements must therefore possess a rudiment of life.” This is the same implied supposition which we have just considered; if life is not the basis of each element, it cannot result from their simple assemblage.

Man and animals are combinations of atoms, says M. le Dantec. It is more natural to admit that human consciousness is the result of the elementary consciousness of the constituent atoms than to consider it as resulting from construction by means of elements with no consciousness. “Life,” says Haeckel, “is universal; we could not conceive of its existence in certain aggregates of matter if it did not belong to their constituent elements.” Here the postulate is almost expressed.

The argument is always the same; even the same words are used: the fundamental hypothesis is the same; only it remains more or less unexpressed, more or less unperceived. It may be stated as follows:—Arrangement, assemblage, construction, and aggregation are powerless to bring to light in the complex anything new and essentially heterogeneous to what already exists in the elements. Reciprocally, grouping reveals in a complex a property and character which is the gradual development of an analogous property and character in the elements. It is in this sense that there exists a collective soul in crowds, the psychology of which has been discussed by M. G. Le Bon. In the same way, many sociologists, adopting the views advanced by P. de Lilienfeld in 1865, attribute to nations a formal individuality, after the type of that possessed by each of their constituent members. M. Izolet considers society as an organism, which he calls a “hyperzoan.” Herbert Spencer has developed the comparison of the collective organism with the individual organism, insisting on their resemblances and differences. Th. Ribot has dwelt, in particular, on the resemblances.

The postulate that we have clearly stated here is accepted by many as an axiom. But it is not an axiom. When we say that there is nothing in the complex that cannot be found in the parts, we think we are expressing a self-evident truth; but we are, in fact, merely stating an hypothesis. It is assumed that arrangement, aggregation, and complicated and skilful grouping of elements can produce nothing really new in the order of phenomena. And this is an assertion that requires verification in each particular case.

The Principle of Continuity, a Consequence of the Preceding.—Let us apply this principle to the beings in nature. All beings in nature are, according to current ideas, arrangements, aggregates, or groupings of the same universal matter, that is to say, of the same simple chemical bodies. It results from the preceding postulate that their activities can only differ in degree and form, and not fundamentally. There is no essential difference of nature between the activities of various categories of beings, no heterogeneity, no discontinuity. We may pass from one to another without coming to an hiatus or impassable gulf. The law of continuity thus appears as a simple consequence of the fundamental postulate. And so it is with the law of evolution, for evolution is merely continuity of action.

Such are the origins of the philosophical doctrine which universalizes life and extends it to all bodies in nature.

It may be remarked that this doctrine is not confined to any particular school or sect. Leibniz was by no means a materialist, and he endowed his mundane elements, his monads, not only with a sort of life, but even with a sort of soul. Father Boscovitch, Jesuit as he was, and professor in the college of Rome, did not deny to his indivisible points a kind of inferior vitality. St. Thomas, too, the angelical doctor, attributed, according to M. Gardair, to inanimate substances a certain kind of activity, inborn inclinations, and a real appetition towards certain acts.