40 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 



background to our recent work we have abandoned 

 the ideas of the atomistic school of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury only to fall back on the doctrines formulated by 

 Descartes in the seventeenth, as Sir Joseph Larmor has 

 pointed out. 



To show this connection, it is necessary only to out- 

 line and contrast briefly these two methods of scientific 

 procedure now, as I have already shown the tendencies 

 of the atomistic school and shall give, in the next chap- 

 ter, the ideas of Descartes. The followers of the 

 atomistic school believe natural phenomena to result 

 from the impact of atoms, possessing mass, figure or 

 extent, indestructibility, and the inherent property of 

 motion. Thus this idea, adopted by Huygens, agrees 

 in the main with that of Newton, except as it rejects 

 his hypothesis of the occult power of attraction of 

 atom for atom through space. With Descartes matter, 

 as a distinct and separate entity, disappears altogether, 

 and nothing is left but space and its variations. What 

 we call pure space or a vacuum is really a continuous 

 fluid plenum or ether, and material bodies are merely 

 places of permanent variation in this plenum. From 

 observing the persistence of whirlpools in water and in 

 the air, Descartes ingeniously concluded that all space 

 was filled with whirlpools or vortices of this plenum, 

 each having an axis which passes through one of the 

 stars. Unfortunately for the theory, these vortices and 

 material variations of space soon became so compli- 



