ESSAYS 4S3 



sunbeams, would suggest the same speculative extrapolation of smaller bodies 

 still that reflective inspection of the different magnitudes of bodies would suggest. 

 Thus, by a natural, perhaps inevitable, movement of thought, the Greek mind first 

 attempted to conceive the material world by magnifying magnitudes into one vast, 

 original matter, and then comminuted it into smaller parts during the attempt to 

 derive the actual world from its speculative original. Another step, inevitable 

 perhaps, though probably more difficult to take than we can appreciate, took the 

 Greeks straight to the conception of infinitely small particles or atoms as the 

 structural elements of all bodies. Then the atom took the place of the " mother- 

 stuff" as the original constituent of matter. The concrete movement of thought, 

 with its tortuous complexities and continuous persistence against the clog of the 

 past that tends to restrict it, can only be inadequately represented in summary. 

 Nevertheless, the milestones and signposts do describe the journey, though they 

 are silent on the burden and heat of the day. Anaximander derived the universe 

 from avast continuum of " mother-stuff" — matter was, so to speak, its own ultimate 

 constituent. Empedocles began to break up this single constituent into more 

 elementary constituent parts, though he went no further than the four elements — 

 earth, water, air, and fire. These elements were divisible primal matters and 

 thus ready to be broken up into further constituents. The opinion of Anaxagoras 

 that the ultimate constituents were the particles or " seeds " of stone, gold, water, 

 and the like, constituting individual stony, golden, watery and other objects, was 

 logically transitional between the four elements of Empedocles and the atomism 

 of Leukippus and Democritus. It had been impossible to strike out at one stroke 

 the concept of immutable material particles, extended, indivisible, ano\ differing in 

 size, shape, and weight. It had been impossible to begin the interpretation of 

 nature by means of different atoms, their movements and their arrangements. 

 Dalton was indebted to a struggle of thought, occurring more than two thousand 

 years before him, for a concept that he made into such a powerful instrument of 

 scientific interpretation. 



This minor difficulty (if it be fair to call it "minor") of conceiving minute, 

 ultimate particles at all was organically connected with another serious hindrance 

 to the conception of mechanical atomism. This hindrance can be analytically 

 isolated for discussion, though not isolable in fact. Bergson (in his Introduction 

 to his Creative Evolution) says that the intellect is at home among inanimate 

 objects, and most at home among solids. Its logic, he adds, is a logic of solids, 

 and its concepts are modelled on the solid material body. The concept of the 

 corpuscle that has so effectively served the mechanical interpretation of nature, 

 which, in its turn, has demonstrated its power in the mastery it has bestowed 

 upon science over material processes, is obviously modelled on the solid body. 

 The atom that made the Atomic Theory a dominant concept is primarily, and in 

 the first instance, a speculatively attenuated inanimate solid. But the inanimate 

 solid body was not the first model. A complex process of thought can be sum- 

 marised, adequately, though under the limitations of all concise summarisation, by 

 identifying it with a speculative attenuation to atomic dimensions of the animate 

 object. Before the atom could dominate the mechanical interpretation that has 

 given science its grip over phenomena, its psychism had to be squeezed out of it. 



It is possible that the dregs of its original psychism have not been squeezed 

 out of it yet. Science is being urged to-day to drop the concepts of " force " and 

 " cause." " Force," it is argued, is the ghostly remnant of the Empedoclean strife 

 and friendship that disunited or united the elements, or a name simply pretending 

 to have abandoned the idea of psychical control over bodies and their movements. 



