Note aw — Chapter V

"It is true," says Canon Mozley, "that matter has lately been set before us as claiming more vicinity to mind than it has been usual to assign it; and a scientific man, of the highest genius, has regretted that 'mind and matter have ever been presented to us in the rudest contrast—the one as all noble, the other as all vile.' ... Hobbes, in the 17th century, anticipated this claim, and laid down 'that all matter as matter is endued not only with figure and a capacity of motion, but also with an actual sense and perception, and wants only the organs and memory of animals to express its sensations,'" On Causation, as before, p. 38.

The doctrine of an inferior and irrational, or as some phrase it "a blind intelligence" is the topic next discussed with some fulness in our text.

This "blind intelligence" makes Nature, so to speak, "the instinct of the Universe." Thence it is "no long step" to a belief that the world is a living creature, neither are there wanting modern accounts of the principle of Vitality, and its powers of assimilation,—equally applicable to the accretive growth of a crystal.

The renovators of philosophy were (as Mr. Leslie Ellis remarks) strongly inclined to this belief, its typical teacher being Campanella. Leibniz points out with his usual energy its affinity with the Scholastic doctrine of "substantial forms"—(a very different theory from Bacon's) "formas quasdam substantiales ejusmodi sibi imaginatus videtur, quæ per se sint causa motus in corporibus, quemadmodum Scholastici capiunt;" and proceeds to say, "ita reditur ad tot deunculos, quot formas substantiales, et Gentilem prope polytheismum.... Quum tamen revera in natura nulla sit sapientia, nullus appetitus, ordo vero pulcher ex eo oriatur, quia est horologium Dei." Leibnitii Opera Philosophica, Ed. Erdmann, pp. 52-3.