No. 7. J WURTZ — THEORY OF ATOMS. 393 



repose ; a grain of dust is full of innumerable multitudes of mate- 

 rial unities each of which is agitated by movements. All 

 vibrates in the little world, and this universal restlessness of 

 matter, this ''atomic music" to continue the metaphor of the 

 ancient philosopher, is like the harmony of worlds ; and is it not 

 true that the imagination is equally bewildered and the spirit 

 equally troubled by the spectacle of the illimitable immensity of 

 the universe and by the consideration of the millions of atoms 

 which people a drop of water. Hear the words of Pascal : "I 

 wish to picture not only the visible universe, but the immensity 

 of nature that one can conceive within the limits of an atom ; 

 one may picture there an infinity of worlds, where each has its 

 firmament, as in the visible universe." 



As to matter, it is everywhere the same, and the hydrogen of 

 water we meet with in our sun, in Sirius, and in the nebulae, 

 everywhere it moves, everywhere it vibrates, and these movements 

 which appear to us inseparable from atoms, are also the origin 

 of all physical and chemical force. 



Such is the order of nature, and as science penetrates it fur- 

 ther, she brings to light both the simplicity of the means set at 

 work and the infinite variety of the results. Thus, through the 

 corner of the veil we have been permitted to raise, she enables 

 us to see both the harmony and the profundity of the plan of the 

 universe. Then we enter on another domain which the human 

 spirit will be always impelled to enter and explore. It is thus, 

 and you cannot change it. It is in vain that science has revealed 

 to it the structure of the world and the order of all the pheno- 

 mena ; it wishes to mount higher, and in the conviction that 

 things have not in themselves their own raison d'etre, their 

 support and their origin, it is led to subject them to a first 

 cause — unique, universal God. — Nature, 



