recognize that the constitutive forms of substance must have been created with the world and that they go on subsisting always …
Nevertheless I deemed that we ought not to mix without distinction or to confuse with other forms or souls, minds or rational souls, which are of a superior order and have incomparably more perfection than those forms embedded in matter which, on my view, are to be found everywhere, since in comparison with these others, minds or rational souls are little gods, made in the image of God, and having in them some glimmering of divine light. This is why God governs minds as a prince governs his subjects, or as a father cares for his children; whereas he disposes of other substances as an engineer handles his machines. Thus minds have special laws which set them above the revolutions of matter, by the very order God has introduced into them; and it may truly be said that all the rest are made for them alone, the very revolutions being arranged for the felicity of the virtuous and the punishment of the wicked …
But there still remained the more important question of what becomes of these souls or forms at the death of the animal, or at the destruction of the individual unit of organized substance. This question is the more awkward, inasmuch as it seems unreasonable that souls should remain useless in a chaos of confused matter. This ultimately made me decide that there was only one sensible thing to believe; that is to maintain the conservation not only of the soul but also of the animal itself and of its organic machine; even though the destruction of its grosser parts has reduced it to such smallness that it evades our senses, just as it did before birth. Moreover, nobody can mark precisely the true time of death, which may for a long time pass for a mere suspension of observable actions, and fundamentally is never anything else but that in the case of simple animals; witness the resuscitations of flies which have been drowned and then buried under powdered chalk, and several similar instances, which make us realize that there might be other resuscitations, and in cases which were much further gone, if men were in a position to readjust the machine … It is therefore natural that since an animal has always been living and organized … it should also always continue to be so. And since there is thus no first birth or entirely new generation of the animal it follows that it will suffer no final extinction or complete death, in the strict metaphysical sense …
But rational souls obey much more exalted laws, and are immune from anything which could make them lose the status of citizens of the society of minds, since God has so provided that no changes of matter could make them lose the moral qualities of their personality. And it may be said with truth that everything tends to the perfection not only of the universe in general, but also of these created things in particular, who are destined for so high a degree of happiness that the universe becomes concerned in it by virtue of the divine goodness which is communicated to each created being, in so far as sovereign wisdom can permit …
I am as willing as any man to give the moderns their due but I think they have carried reform too far, among other things in confusing the natural with the artificial, through not having had sufficiently exalted ideas of the majesty of Nature. They conceive that the difference between her machines and ours is but the difference between the great and the small. This recently led a very clever man to remark that when looking at Nature from near at hand she appears less admirable than we thought, being no more than a workman’s shop. I believe that this does not give a sufficiently just idea, or one sufficiently worthy of her, and there is no system except mine which properly exhibits the immense distance which really lies between the least productions and mechanisms of Divine wisdom and the greatest achievements of the skill of a limited mind. This difference is one not merely of degree, but of kind also. It must be recognized that Nature’s machines possess a truly infinite number of organs, and are so well protected and armed against all accidents that it is not possible to destroy them. A natural machine still remains a machine in its least parts, and, what is more, it always remains the very same machine that it was, being merely transformed by the different foldings it receives, and being sometimes stretched, sometimes contracted and as it were concentrated, when we think that it is destroyed.
Furthermore, by means of the soul or form, there is a true unity which corresponds to what is called the I in us; a thing which could not occur in artificial machines, nor in the simple mass of matter, however organized it may be. This can only be regarded as like an army or a flock, or like a pond full of fish, or a watch made up of springs and wheels. Yet if there were no true substantial unities, there would be nothing real or substantial in the collection. It was this that [has led some philosophers to] abandon Descartes and to adopt Democritus’s theory of atoms, in order to find a true unity. But atoms of matter are contrary to reason, besides the fact that they also are composed of parts, since the invincible attachment of one part to another (granted that this could be reasonably conceived or supposed) would not destroy their diversity. It is only atoms of substance, that is to say unities which are real and absolutely without parts, which can be the sources of actions, and the absolute first principles of the composition of things, and as it were the ultimate elements into which substantial things can be analysed. They might be called metaphysical points; there is about them something vital and a kind of perception, and mathematical points are their points of view for expressing the universe. But when corporeal substances are contracted all their organs constitute for us but a physical point. Thus physical points are indivisible in appearance only: mathematical points are exact, but they are nothing but modalities. It is only metaphysical points, or points of substance (constituted by forms or souls), which are both exact and real; and without them there would be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no plurality.
Once I had established these things, I thought I had reached port; but when I set myself to reflect on the union of the soul with the body, I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea. For I could find no way of explaining how the body causes something to happen in the soul, or vice versa, nor how one created substance can communicate with another. M. Descartes left the field at this stage, as far as we can gather from his writings; but his disciples, realizing that the common opinion is inconceivable, maintained that we are aware of the qualities of bodies because God produces thoughts in the soul on the occasion of the movements of matter; and when our soul wishes to move the body in its turn, they deemed that it is God that moves it for the soul. And as the communication of motion seemed to them likewise inconceivable, they maintained that God gives motion to a body on the occasion of the motion of another body. This is what they call the System of occasional causes, which has become very fashionable owing to the fine reflections of the author of the Recherche de la Vérité.5
It must be admitted that they have gone a great way in regard to this problem by showing what cannot possibly take place; but their explanation of what does in fact occur does not remove the difficulty. It is quite true that in the strict metaphysical sense there is no real influence exerted by one created substance on another, and that all things, with all their realities, are continually produced by the power of God: but to solve these problems it is not enough to make use of the general cause, and to drag in what is called the deus ex machina.6 For when this is done without giving any further explanation in terms of the order of secondary causes, this is properly speaking to fall back on miracle. In philosophy, we must attempt to give an explanation showing in what way things are brought about by the Divine wisdom, in conformity with the notion of the subject in question.
Being thus constrained to grant that it is impossible for the soul or for any other true substance to receive anything from without, except by Divine omnipotence, I was insensibly led to adopt a view which surprised me, but which seems inevitable, and which does in fact possess very great advantages and considerable beauties. This view is that we must say that God first created the soul, and every other real unity, in such a way that everything in it must spring from within itself, by a perfect spontaneity with regard to itself, and yet in a perfect conformity with things outside. And thus, since our internal sensations (those, that is to say, which are in the soul itself and not in the brain or in the subtle parts of the body) are but phenomena dependent upon external entities, or rather are really appearances, and, as it were, well-ordered dreams, these internal perceptions within the soul itself must arise in it from its own
