quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere; science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction; the good is one, the bad is innumerable; in every kind of thing in a word the best occurs in the category of the indivisible. Substance in general, which underlies and sustains things, is divided into two species, extended substance or that which equally supports unequal extensions, and thinking substance which equally supports unequal thoughts. And just as one part of extension is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the body, so one part of thought, that is to say a determinate thought, is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the soul. Activity or freedom is peculiar to the soul, and entirely denied to body: and Descartes, in making a conation of body the beginning of his physics, was strictly adopting the methods of a poet and falling into the anthropomorphic conceptions of primitive races. The phenomena which students of mechanics call activities, forms, or powers, are insensible movements by which bodies move either, as the ancients said, towards their centres of gravity, or, as the modern theory of mechanics asserts, away from their centre of motion. The communication of motion, moreover, is just as inconceivable in body as is activity. To grant it would be equivalent to granting the interpenetration of bodies, since motion is nothing but matter in motion; the blow given to a ball is only the occasion for the energy of the universe, which was so weak in the ball as to make it seem at rest, to expand and thus to give it an appearance of more sensible motion. On the other hand, Vico agreed with the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, as to the origin of ideas, which he inclined to believe that God creates in us from time to time. He also held with the Cartesians that the lower animals are automata; and he agreed with all contemporary thought as to the subjectivity of secondary qualities.