THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 



The analytic and synthetic tendencies of the human 

 mind are traceable throughout history, great writers 

 ranging themselves sometimes on the one side, some- 

 times on the other. Men of warm feelings, and minds 

 open to the elevating impressions produced by nature 

 as a whole, whose satisfaction, therefore, is rather 

 ethical than logical, lean to the synthetic side ; while 

 the analytic harmonises best with the more precise 

 and more mechanical bias which seeks the satisfaction 

 of the understanding. Some form of pantheism was 

 usually adopted by the one, while a detached Creator, 

 working more or less after the manner of men, was often 

 assumed by the other. Gassendi, as sketched by Lange, 

 is hardly to be ranked with either. Having formally 

 acknowledged (rod as the great first cause, he im- 

 mediately dropped the idea, applied the known -laws of 

 mechanics to the atoms, and deduced from them all 

 vital phenomena. He defended Epicurus, and dwelt 

 upon his purity, both of doctrine and of life. True he 

 was a heathen, but so was Aristotle. Epicurus assailed 

 superstition and religion, and rightly, because he did 

 not know the true religion. He thought that the gods 

 neither rewarded nor punished, and he adored them 

 purely in consequence of their completeness : here we 

 see, says Gassendi, the reverence of the child, instead of 

 the fear of the slave. The errors of Epicurus shall be 

 corrected, and the body of his truth retained. Gassendi 

 then proceeds, as any heathen might have done, to 

 build up the world, and all that therein is, of atoms and/ 

 molecules. God, who created earth and water, plants 

 and animals, produced 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 now goes on, and which will con- 

 tinue in future. The principle of every change resides 



VOL. IT. M 



