170 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



with vehemence, and the same repugnance to accepting 

 it is manifest in Carlyle. 1 



The analytic and synthetic tendencies of the human 

 mind are traceable throughout history, great writers rang- 

 ing themselves sometimes on the one side, sometimes 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 log- 

 ical, lean to the synthetic side; while the analytic har- 

 monizes 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. Gas- 

 sendi, as sketched by Lange, is hardly to be ranked with 

 either. Having formally acknowledged God as the great 

 first cause, he immediately 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 Gas- 

 sendi, the reverence of the child, instead of the fear of 



1 Boyle's model of the universe was the Strasburg clock witjb. an outside 

 Artificer. Goethe, on the other hand, sang 



"Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 

 Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen." 



also Carlyle, "Past and Present," chap. v. 





