Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/598

 586 T. HAEPEE'S METAPHYSICS OF THE SCHOOL, in. i. Then, through page after page of recondite and exquisite disquisi- tion, which we may not trace through all its windings and spaces, the two-faced sophism, absolute vacuum and distant action, is reduced" to absurdity ; and with it atomism. But surely this is to take scientists too seriously and punctually. Are we not all agreed that "Nothing is not," that Nothing - between is be- tween nothing, that absolute emptiness is simply collapse and entire togetherness, that activity is indistance or presence, and that inactivity is the only true distance or absence, without any fine question of " potential " or " actual " presence or being, that when and where a thing acts, it is, and when and where it is, it acts ? And, if we are so agreed and yet hold by atomism in some fashion that gainsays these axioms of the organised com- mon-sense of Philosophy, then it is only so much the worse for our tenet. That is all. But F. Harper's scholastic atomism does not suffer from such collision, and yet only because he en- closes it for safety in that supersubtle air of " virtuality," which suffocates some of us and is, perhaps, all too thin for any ordi- nary mortal breathing. Here is his solution, which, for shortness, must be left to ex- plain itself. " There is a physical minimum, which is physically atomic." It exists. Yet, only " an atomic theory which main- tains the virtual atomicity of bodies is admissible," and " the theory which maintains that bodies are constituted of actual atoms and that the atoms of the constituents integrally remain in the compound" is false. Water is not H 2 0. It does not " consist " of these, though they have lent their formed matter to be consumed by water's " substantial form " or informing soul in the making of itself to be quite itself, that is to say, into a " new substance". In this single instance, you have " potentialiter " the whole of the School on genesis. And the cardinals of the doctrine are Aristotle's " matter and form " : " in the beginning," and all along to the end, not atoms, molecules, forces, but " sub- stantial form and primordial matter ". But are we really any happier with our author's " Philosopher " and his " Saint " than with the crude atomists of to-day? What is this venerable teaching at its best but voluminous and elaborate restatement of sensible fact and common thought and speech about it a learned rendering of the vernacular of mind, displacing with somewhat prosaic speculation the wondering regard and search of the child and the poet, smothering with a false guise of knowledge wise and healthy scepticism and agnosticism, and supplying a foreign furniture of the mind which rather lends itself to the uses of the sophist than of the philosopher ? And thus, with it's air of exacti- tude, and its finer edge and more precise straightness than unsophisticated sense and imagination will bear, it " oversteps the modesty of nature," and becomes a distraction, a dissipation, an excess. We may be debauched with even moderate meta- physic. And with F. Harper's thoroughgoing kind there is besides