Manchester Memoirs, Vol. x/vn. (igo;^), No. tl. 3 



classes of minds. The arithmetical thinker deals primarily 

 with number, which Ms, in its nature, discontinuous, and 

 to him a material discontinuity offers no difficulties. The 

 geometer, on the other hand, has to do with continuous 

 magnitudes, and a limited divisibility of anything in space 

 is not easy for him to conceive. But be this as it may, 

 the controversy was one of words rather than of realities, 

 and its intricacies have little interest for the scientific 

 student of to-day. It is always easier to reason about 

 things as we imagine they ought to be, than about things 

 as they really are, and the latter procedure became 

 practicable only after experimental science was pretty far 

 advanced. The Greeks were deficient in physical know- 

 ledge, and therefore their speculations remained specula- 

 tions only, mere intellectual gymnastics of no direct 

 utility to mankind. They sought to determine the nature 

 of things by the exercise of reason alone, whereas science, 

 as we understand it, being less confident, seeks mainly to 

 coordinate evidence, and to discover the general statement 

 which shallembrace the largest possible number of observed 

 relations. The man of science may use the metaphysical 

 method as a tool, but he does so with the limitations of 

 definite, verifiable knowledge always in view. Intellectual 

 stimulants may be used temperately, but they need not be 

 discarded altogether. 



From the time of Lucretius until the seventeenth 

 century of our era, the atomistic hypothesis received little 

 serious attention. The philosophy of Aristotle governed 

 all the schools of Europe, and scholastic quibblings took 

 the place of real investigation. All scholarship lay under 

 bondage to one master mind, and it was not until Galileo 

 let fall his weights from the leaning tower of Pisa that 

 the spell of the Stagirite was broken. Experimental 

 science now came to the fore, and it was seen that even 



