THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



quite modern fashion the reasons for this postulate; 

 first, motion can take place only in unoccupied space; 

 second, bodies cannot contract or expand unless they 

 do not occupy all the space within their boundary; 

 third, fluids may penetrate into solids; and fourth, 

 organic beings depend on the penetration of fluids in 

 their solid portions. Democritus also is strictly scien- 

 tific in discarding such causes for motion or combina- 

 tion as an Animate Will in the atoms or a Ruling 

 Mind in the universe. The atoms combine and sepa- 

 rate, they move and come to rest in obedience to nat- 

 ural law; "In virtue of which things of like weight 

 and shape must come to the same places; just as we 

 observe in the winnowing of grain. "^ 



If Democritus had had at his command such a 

 force as Newton afterwards expressed in his law of 

 universal gravitation — that all atoms attract each 

 other with a force inversely as the square of the dis- 

 tance between them — he would have given the iden- 

 tical picture of the creation of the solar system which 

 Kant and Laplace, in the eighteenth century, em- 

 bodied in their famous nebular hypothesis. And this 

 would have been an example of pure deductive rea- 

 soning as the basis of science. By the mere substitu- 

 tion of the idea of force and energy as an attribute of 

 substance, in place of the undefined motions and the 

 principle of each kind of matter seeking its like kind 

 of Democritus, we have been able to measure quan- 



3 Uberweg-Prachter, Gesch. der Phil., p. 121. 



1:42 3 



