PROFESSOR TYND ALL'S ADDRESS. 663 



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 phe- 

 nomena. God, who created earth and water, plants and animals, pro- 

 duced 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 con- 

 tinue in the future. The principle of every change resides in matter. 

 In artificial productions the moving principle is different from the ma- 

 terial 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 in- 

 fluence so large as to render the soul almost imnecessary. The aber- 

 rations 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 lect- 

 ure delivered by him at Bradford last year. According to both phi- 

 losophers, 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 ma- 

 terial 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 o^ 

 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 



^ Boyle's model of the universe was the Straisbourg clock with an outside artificer. 

 Goethe, on the other hand, sang : 



" Ihm ziemt'B die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 

 Natur in sicb, Bich in Natiir zn hegen." 



The same repugnance to the clockmaker conception is manifest in Carlyle. 



