5. There remains for me only to satisfy the difficulties which you have raised, M., against the indestructibility of the substantial forms; and, first of all, I am surprised that you find this point strange and untenable, because, according to your own position, all those who assign to animals a soul and feeling ought to maintain this indestructibility. These supposed difficulties are only prejudices of the mind, which may detain common thinkers but which have no influence upon minds capable of meditation. I think it will be easy to satisfy you in regard to them. Those who perceive that there is an infinity of small animals in the least drop of water, as the experiments of M. Leewenhoeck have shown, and who do not find it strange that matter should be entirely filled with animated substances, will not find it strange either that there should be something animated in the ashes themselves, and that fire can transform an animal and reduce it, without, however, entirely destroying it. That which can be said of one caterpillar or silk-worm could be said of one hundred or one thousand, but it does not follow that we should see the silk worm re-born from the ashes. Perhaps such is not the order of nature. I know that many assure us that the generative powers remain in ashes in such a way that plants can be produced from them but I do not wish to employ doubtful experiments. Whether these small organized bodies produced by a kind of contraction from larger bodies that have become destroyed, are, as it seems wholly out of the series of generation, or whether they can come back again to the theater of action in due time, is something which I am unable to determine. These are secrets of nature where men must acknowledge their ignorance.

6. It is only apparently and as a result of the imagination that the difficulty seems greater with regard to the larger animals which are born only by the union of two sexes. This is apparently not less necessary with the smallest insects. I have recently learned that M. Leewenhoeck holds opinions quite like mine, in that he maintains that the largest animals are born by a kind of transformation. I do not dare either to approve or to reject the details of his opinion, but I hold it as true in general, and M. Swammerdam, another great investigator and anatomist, says that he also has leanings toward that opinion. Now, the opinions of these men are far more important in such matters than those of many others. True it is, I do not see that they have carried out their opinions so far as to say that corruption, and death itself, is also a transformation with respect to the living beings which are destitute of a reasonable soul, as I hold; but I think that if they were informed of my position they would not find it absurd, for there is nothing so natural as to think that that which does not begin does not perish either, and when it is acknowledged that all births are only growths or developments of an animal already formed, it is easy to be persuaded that decay or death is nothing else than the diminution or the decrease of an animal, which, nevertheless, continues to exist and to be living and organized. It is true that it is not as easy to render this position acceptable through special experiments as it is with respect to generation, but the reason for this is evident; it is because generation advances from physical matter, little by little, so that we have time to see it, but death goes backward too much by a spring and at once returns to particles too small for us, because death occurs usually in too violent a manner for us to be able to follow out the details of this retrogression. Sleep, however, which is an image of death, and ecstacies, and the condition of the silk worm in its cocoon, which might pass for a death, also the resuscitation of flies quite drowned, through the means of a certain dry powder that may be sprinkled upon them (these flies remaining wholly dead if they are left without any assistance), and, furthermore, the state of swallows, which hibernate in the reeds, where they are found apparently dead, and the experiences of men who die from cold, from drowning or from strangulation, whom it is possible to bring to life again (in regard to which not long since a careful thinker in Germany wrote a treatise where, after having given instances known to himself personally, he exhorts those who have to do with such persons, to make more efforts than are usually made to revive them, and he describes the proper method)- all these things serve to confirm my position that these different states differ only in degree, and if we have not the means of bringing about the resuscitation after other kinds of death, it is because we do not know what must be done, or, even if we should know what must be done, our hands and our instruments and our remedies would not be successful, above all, when the dissolution goes at once into too minute particles. We must not, therefore, hold to the notions which common people may have regarding death or life, when there are both analogies and, what is better, weighty arguments to prove the contrary, for, I think, I have sufficiently shown that there must be entelechies if there are corporeal substances, and if these entelechies or souls are acknowledged, their ingenerability and indestructibility must be recognized. After this, it is incomparably more reasonable to think of the transformation of animated bodies than to conceive of the passage of souls from one body to another, which latter opinion, though very ancient, seems to be merely a form of transformation not well understood. To say that the souls of animals remain without a body or that they remain concealed in a body which is not organized, appears less natural than my position. Whether the animal resulting from the diminution of the body of the ram which Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac should be called a ram is only a question of names, very much as would be the question whether a moth should be called a silk worm; the difficulty which you have found, M., in regard to the ram reduced to ashes comes only because I did not sufficiently explain myself. You suppose that no organized body remains in the ashes and therefore you have a right to say that it would be a monstrous thing, this infinity of souls without organized bodies; while my position is that in the state of nature there are no souls without animated bodies and no animated bodies without organs. Neither ashes nor any other mass appears to me incapable of containing organized bodies.