8 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 



Democritus had been extended and adapted to mathe- 

 matical analysis by Gassendi, Huygens, and Boscovich, 

 Thus all bodies and systems of bodies became ab- 

 stractly alike in character, a collection of mass points 

 acted upon by an attractive force common to all; and 

 if the state of the universe were given at any time, it 

 became merely a problem in mechanics, whose laws are 

 fully known, to find its history from the beginning 

 to the end. As Laplace proudly and naively answered : 

 " In this system there is no need of a god." Evidently 

 this statement was a climax of materialism, and prob- 

 ably can never again be uttered with such assurance. 



So solidly was this theoretical universe built, that it 

 defied criticism for a century, and finally, as it seemed, 

 established science on a mechanical basis. The other 

 branches of physics, which advanced rapidly during the 

 nineteenth century, fell promptly under the influence of 

 this mechanistic idea. The names employed show this 

 clearly. We have the wave theories of light and 

 sound, the dynamic theory of heat, and the mechanical 

 theories of electricity and magnetism. In all these 

 theories, attributes of matter, such as color, tempera- 

 ture, musical pitch, electrical charge, etc., are ex- 

 pressed by the mechanical motions and forces of 

 atoms, and are measured solely in terms of the 

 mechanical units of length, mass, and time. The 

 method absolutely eliminates our senses, not only as 

 instruments capable of measuring the quantity of an 



