explanation of all phenomenality. Physical properties, vital phenomena, psychical facts, all have their foundation in this immanent activity. Material activity is a minimum of soul or thought which, by continuous gradation and progressive complexity, without solution of continuity, without an abrupt transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, rises through the series of living beings to the dignity of the human soul. The observation of the transitions, an imperfect tracing of the geometrical method of limits, thus enables us to pass from material to vital, and from thence to psychical activity.
Apparent Heterogeneity is the Result of the Arrangement or the Combination of Homogeneous Bodies.—In this system, material energy, life, soul would only be more and more complex combinations of the con-*substantial activity with material atoms. Life appears distinct from physical force, and thought from life, because the analysis has not yet advanced far enough. Thus, glass would appear to the ancient Chaldeans distinct from the sand and salt of which they made it. In the same way, again, water, to modern eyes, is distinct from its constituents, oxygen and hydrogen. The whole difficulty is that of explaining what this "arrangement" of the elements can introduce that is new in the aspect of the compound. We must know what novelty and apparent homogeneity the variety of the combinations, which are only special arrangements of the elementary parts, may produce in the phenomena. But we do not know, and it is this ignorance which leads us to consider them as heterogeneous, irreducible, and distinct in principle. The vital phenomenon, the complexus of physico-chemical facts, thus appears to us essentially different from
