THE E EL FA ST A DDR ESS. 485 
ing bodies. Abstracting from this, they permitted their 
atoms to fall eternally through empty space. Democritus 
assumed that the larger atoms moved more rapidly than 
the smaller ones, which they therefore could overtake, and 
with which tney could combine. Epicurus, holding that 
empty space could offer no resistance to motion, .ascribed 
to all the atoms the same velocity: but he seems to have 
overlooked the consequence that under such circumstances 
the atoms could never combine. Lucretius cut the knot 
by quitting the domain of physics altogether, and causing 
the atoms to move together by a kind of volition. 
Was the instinct utterly at fault which caused Lucretius 
thus to swerve from his own principles? Diminishing 
gradually the number of progenitors, Mr. Darwin comes at 
length to one " primordial form; " but he does not say, so 
far as I remember, how he supposes this form to have been 
introduced. He quotes with satisfaction the words of a 
celebrated author and divine who had "gradually learned to 
see that it was just as noble a conception of the Deity to 
believe He created a few original forms, capable of self- 
development into other and needful forms, as to believe 
He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids 
caused by the action of his laws." What Mr. Darwin 
thinks of this view of the introduction of life, I do not 
know. But the anthropomorphism, which it- seemed his 
object to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation 
of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude. We 
need clearness and thoroughness here. Two courses and 
two only are possible. Either let us open our doors 
freely to the conception of creative acts, or abandoning 
them, let us radically change our notions of Matter. If 
we look at matter as pictured by Democritus, and as de- 
lined for generations in our scientific text-books, the 
notion, of conscious life coming out of it cannot be formed 
by the mind. The argument placed in the mouth of 
Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to crush all such 
materialism as this. Those, however, who framed these 
definitions of matter were but partial students. They 
were not biologists, but mathematicians, whose labors 
referred only to such accidents and properties of matter 
as could be expressed in their formula?. Their science was 
mechanical science, not the science of life. With matter 
in its wholeness they never dealt; and, denuded by their 
