ABSTRACT
That in the heart of matter there was always a germ of spirit seems to me as much a truism as it would be to say that in a grape-seed lies the potentiality of the vine, the vine-leaves, and the grapes that actually grow out of it. “Potentiality” does not signify the preexistence of eventual things; it signifies only the existence of the conditions which, according to the process of nature, will bring those things about. I smile at the acrobatic logic of Leibnitz, who convinced himself that little feelings and ideas must exist in every 11minutest particle of cosmic substance. Anaxagoras had reasoned in that way in his qualitative atomism, thinking that metamorphosis must be as impossible in nature as in the realm of essence. But eternal self-identity is proper to essences precisely because they are not elements in the existing or living world, where everything is unstable, unnecessary, and arbitrarily original. The fertility of matter is proper to its function as the substance of a thoroughly irrational groping, self-devouring process, which only by chance, or in certain abstract aspects, settles down for a season into constant or calculable order.
