/lit/ - Literature

>Thus every organized body of a living thing is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton. It infinitely surpasses any artificial automaton, because a man-made machine isn’t a machine in every one of its parts. For example, a cog on a brass wheel has parts or fragments which to us are no longer anything artificial, and bear no signs of their relation to the intended use of the wheel, signs that would mark them out as parts of a machine. But Nature’s machines—living bodies, that is—are machines even in their smallest parts, right down to infinity. That is what makes the difference between nature and artifice, that is, between divine artifice and our artifice.

>Philosophers have been at a loss regarding the origin of forms, entelechies, or souls, but not any longer.

>Careful investigations into plants, insects and animals have shown that Nature’s organic bodies are never produced from chaos or from putrefaction, but always from seeds, in which there is without doubt already some preformation. Rather than something formed being generated from something formless, it has turned out that what is formed always comes from something that was already formed. So these days we think that before conception there is an organized body there, and that this has a soul; which is to say that before conception there is already an animal there. What conception does is to launch that animal into a great transformation that will turn it into an animal of a different kind.

>Thus God alone is the basic unitary thing, the original simple substance. All created or derivative monads are produced by him. They are generated by the continual flashes of silent lightning (so to speak) that God gives off from moment to moment—flashes that are limited ·in what they can give only· by the essential limits on what the created things can take in.