26 NATURE AND LIFE. 



mere experimentalism is that it may sentence men to the 

 fixed and stubborn contemplation of this scratch. What 

 folly ! All the history of the development of the sciences 

 proves that important discoveries all proceed from a differ- 

 ent feeling, which is that of continuation of forces beyond 

 the limits of observation, and of a harmony in relations, 

 overruling the singularities and deformities of detached 

 experiences. To hedge one's self within what can be com- 

 puted, weighed, and demonstrated, to trust such evidence 

 only, and bar one's self inside the prison of the senses, to 

 hush or scorn the suggestions of the spirit, our only true 

 light, because it is the spark of the flame that vivifies all 

 this is, deny it or not, the condition and the subject state 

 of materialism. Only reason can conceive the fixity, the 

 generality, and the universality of relations, and all sa- 

 vants admit that the destiny of science is to establish laws 

 possessing these three characteristics ; but to admit that is 

 to confess by implication that partial, incoherent, imper- 

 fect, relative details must undergo a refining, a thorough 

 conversion in the alembic of the mind, whence they issue, 

 with so new an aspect and meaning, that what before 

 seemed most important becomes as mere an accessory as it 

 is possible to be, and that which looked most ephemeral 

 takes its place among eternal things. 



The conception of atoms dates from the highest antiq- 

 uity. Leucippus and Democritus, the masters of Epicurus, 

 several centuries before the Christian era, taught that mat- 

 ter is composed of invisible but indestructible corpuscles, 

 the number of which is as boundless as the vastness of the 

 space in which they are diffused. These corpuscles are 

 solid, endowed with shape and motion. The difference of 

 their forms regulates the difference of their movements, 

 and consequently of their characteristics. The conception 

 of a principle guiding these diversities, that is, of an intel- 

 ligence as the supreme cause of differentiation, is not less 



