462 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
mind are traceable throughout history, great writers ranging 
themselves sometimes on the one side, sometimes on the 
obher^TMen 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 harmonizes best 
with the more precise and more mechanical .bias which 
seeks the satisfaction of the understanding. -A' 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. Gasseudi, 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 super- 
stition 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 con- 
sequence 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 
continue in future. The principle of every change resides 
in matter. In. artificial productions the moving principle 
is different from the material worked upon; Tnit in nature 
the agent works within, being the most active and mobile 
part of the material itself. Thus this bold ecclesiastic, 
without incurring the censure of the church or the world, 
contrives to outstrip Mr. Darwin. The same cast of mind 
which caused him to detach the Creator from his universe 
led him also to detach the soul from the body, though to 
the body he ascribes an influence so large as to render the 
soul almost unnecessary. The aberrations of reason were, 
in his view, an affair of the material brain. Mental disease 
