5 62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



use, for censure's sake, has been made, against this system, of the 

 seeming ease with which its professors have convinced themselves 

 that they cut up by the roots the very princijiles of morality and duty. 

 History proves, by examples too infamous, that barbarism and license 

 are the privilege of no philosophic sect. The real enemies of society 

 always have been, and always will be, the ignorant and the fanatical, 

 and it must be frankly owned that, if these exist within the pale of 

 materialism, there are quite enough of them outside. The danger in 

 the doctrine which reverses the natural relation of things, and asserts 

 that spirit is a product of matter, when in truth matter is a product 

 of spirit, this danger is of another kind ; materialism is fatal to the 

 development of the experimental sciences themselves. If, in such a 

 case, the example of men of genius might be appealed to, how elo- 

 quent would be the testimony of the two greatest physicists of this 

 age, Ampere and Faraday, both so earnestly convinced, so religiously 

 possessed by the reality of the unseen world ! But there are other 

 arguments. " All that we see of the world," says Pascal, " is but an 

 imperceptible scratch in the vast range of Nature." The claim of 

 mere experimentalism is that it may sentence men to the fixed and 

 stubborn contemplation of this scratch. What folly ! All the history 

 of the development of the sciences proves that important discoveries 

 all proceed from a different feeling, which is that of a continuation of 

 forces beyond the limits of observation, and of a harmony in relations, 

 overruling the singularities and deformities of detached experiences. 

 To hedge one's self within what can be computed, weighed, and demon- 

 strated, to trust such evidence only, and bar one's self inside the prison 

 of the senses, to hush or scorn the suggestions of the spirit, our only 

 true light, because it is a spark of the flame that vivifies all this is, 

 deny it or not, the condition and the subject state of materialism. 

 Only reason can conceive the fixity, the generality, and the universality 

 of relations, and all savants admit that the destiny of science is to 

 establish laws possessing these three characteristics; but to admit that 

 is to confess by implication that partial, incoherent, imperfect, relative 

 details must undergo a refining, a thorough conversion, in the alembic 

 of the mind, whence they issue, with so new an aspect and meaning, 

 that what before seemed most important becomes as mere an accessory 

 as it is possible to be, and that which looked most ephemeral takes its 

 place among eternal things. 



The conception of atoms dates from the highest antiquity. Leu- 

 cippus and Democritus, the masters of Epicurus, several centuries be- 

 fore the Christian era, taught that matter is composed of invisible but 

 indestructible corpuscles, the number of which is as boundless as the 

 vastness of the space in which they are diffused. These corpuscles are 

 solid, endowed with shape and motion. The difference of their forms 

 regulates the difference of their movements, and consequently of their 

 characteristics. The conception of a principle guiding these diversi- 



