Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/579

Rh, that is, of an intelligence as the supreme cause of differentiation, is not less ancient, "All was chaotic," Anaxagoras of Clazomene said; "an intelligence intervened, and regulated all." Plato, after defining matter as an existence very hard to understand, an eternal place, never perishing, and furnishing a stage of whatever begins to be, not the subject of sense and yet perceptible, and of which we only catch glimpses as in a dream, tells us that the supreme ruler "took this mass which was whirling in unchecked and unguided movement, and made order come out of disorder." And this ordering grows real in conformity with ideas, the prototypes of things, whose totality makes the divine essence itself. The world's activities are reflections of God's thoughts. To these two fundamental notions, that of atomism and that of idealism, Aristotle added a third, that of dynamism. As he holds, indeterminate matter, in the highest degree of abstraction, is without attributes. If it tends always toward form and action, that is because it contains a principle of power, a force. Force is in Aristotle's view the principle of form. The latter relates to substance. "We have here the whole ancient philosophy regarding the world. Modern philosophy has taught us nothing different. Atomism, strengthened and widened by Descartes, and borrowed from him by Newton, is identical at bottom with that held by the teachers of Epicurus. In the same way, Leibnitz's dynamism is only a revival of Aristotle's. And, just as Descartes and Leibnitz reproduce the old Greek masters, contemporary science renews Descartes and Leibnitz.

"But what!" it will be said; "always repeating, never inventing, must that be the fixed doom of metaphysics?" Not so; these renewals contain continuous growth toward perfection. The old truth has been preserved, in its original sense, but it has been constantly illuminated and made exact in the lapse of time by happy efforts of speculative genius. Greek atomism had an immense chasm which Descartes filled by the conception of ether, the most marvellous of modern creations. Aristotle's dynamism was vague, and Leibnitz gave it precision by showing that the type and the fountain of force is and can be nothing else than spirit. He lifted the conception of force to the conception of soul. And what has been done in our days?We have computed the motion, we have detected the action, of that subtle ether, we have proved the absolute imperishableness of force, we have shown by many instances the fundamental identity of the appetitive and elective powers of chemistry and crystallography with those which psychology reveals. Here is the future of science and of metaphysics. Both will henceforth follow in their development the very course they have held to since the first day; they have never, like Penelope, destroyed yesterday's work the day after. They have pursued the same end with continuous advance, that is, the conception of invisible principles, and of the ideal essence of things. This end will remain the ever unattained goal of their ambition. The farther we shall