Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/683

Rh manner of men, was often assumed by the other. Gassendi is hardly to be ranked with either. Having formerly acknowledged God as the first great cause, he immediately drops the idea, applies the known laws of mechanics to the atoms, and thence deduces all vital phenomena. God, who created earth and water, plants and animals, produced in the first place a definite number of atoms, which constituted the seed of all things. Then began that series of combinations and decompositions which goes on at the present day, and which will continue in the future. The principle of every change resides in matter. In artificial productions the moving principle is different from the material worked upon; but in Nature the agent works within, being the most active and mobile part of the material itself. Thus this bold ecclesiastic, without incurring the censure of the Church or the world, contrives to outstrip Mr. Darwin. The same cast of mind which caused him to detach the Creator from his universe led him also to detach the soul from the body, though to the body he ascribes an influence so large as to render the soul almost unnecessary. The aberrations of reason were in his view an affair of the material brain. Mental disease is brain-disease; but then the immortal reason sits apart, and cannot be touched by the disease. The errors of madness are errors of the instrument, not of the performer.

It may be more than a mere result of education, connecting itself probably with the deeper mental structure of the two men, that the idea of Gassendi, above enunciated, is substantially the same as that expressed by Prof. Clerk Maxwell at the close of the very noble lecture delivered by him at Bradford last year. According to both philosophers, the atoms, if I understand aright, are the prepared materials, the "manufactured articles," which, formed by the skill of the Highest, produce by their subsequent interaction all the phenomena of the material world. There seems to be this difference, however, between Gassendi and Maxwell: the one postulates, the other infers his first cause. In his manufactured articles, Prof. Maxwell finds the basis of an induction which enables him to scale philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the logical step from the atoms to their Maker.

The atomic doctrine, in whole or in part, was entertained by Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, and their successors, until the chemical law of multiple proportions enabled Dalton to confer upon it an entirely new significance. In our day there are secessions from the theory, but it still stands firm. Only a year or two ago Sir William Thomson, with characteristic penetration, sought