TENDENCIES OF MODERN PHYSICS 33 



tific discoveries directly and inevitably produced by a 

 specific atomic theory. The contrary of this opinion 

 is very generally held, and many such discoveries in 

 chemistry and physics are laid at its door. The 

 chemist searches for and combines new compounds 

 of the elements, and bases his theory on the assump- 

 tion that each element is disintegrable only to a fixed 

 atom. But this means nothing more than to say that 

 the elements combine in definite proportions of mass, 

 and consequently does not bear on the question whether 

 matter is infinitely divisible. The chemist would have 

 been driven to the same laws of chemical combina- 

 tion if he had believed matter to be infinitely divisible. 

 This statement is true, because chemical analysis and 

 synthesis progress imperturbed and as rapidly now 

 when the chemical atom is supposed to be decompos- 

 able. And the same was true of chemical progress 

 before Dalton proposed his atomic theory, which be- 

 sides was so simple in form as to be little more than 

 the generalization, that from experience we may say 

 chemical substances unite in simple multiples of a unit 

 chemical mass, called the atom, instead of simple pro- 

 portions of mass. That is, Dalton's atomic theory was 

 more closely related to the abstractive than to the 

 hypothetical method and really has little in common 

 with the physical atomic hypothesis which gives defi- 

 nite and complex functions to the atom. As examples 

 in another field, we find the phenomena and laws of the 



