 This image of a kind of eternity in which “loving molecules” gradually return to one another, impelled by a residual consciousness of the love present in their “parent bodies”, resonates with the powerful rendition he gives in the first dialogue of the Rêve of the thought experiment of the statue. Recall that the character D’Alembert had challenged the character Diderot to show that matter could think, and the latter had retorted that if he could show that matter could sense the solution would be found. The character Diderot then proposed a thought experiment of a marble statue, ground into powder, mixed into the earth, out of which plants grow that are eaten by animals who are in turn eaten by us. He calls this process the “animalization” of matter. Thus framed, the difference between a piece of marble and a sensing, conscious creature is only a difference in the temporal stages of a portion of matter in transformation. Unlike Condillac’s statue, Diderot’s is no longer a strictly epistemological account of the genesis of our knowledge (and self-consciousness) through the accumulation of intermodal sensory information. Instead, it is an assertion of the animalization of inert matter, such that all matter is either actually or potentially alive.