160 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



sendi 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 defi- 

 nite 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 erery change 

 resides in matter. In artificial productions the moving 

 principle is different from the material worked upon; 

 but 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 is brain-disease; but then the immortal reason 

 sits apart, and cannot be touched by the disease. The 

 errors of madness are those of the instrument, not of 

 the performer. 



It may be more than a mere result of education, 

 connecting itself, probably,with the deeper mental 

 structure of the two men, that the idea of Gassendi, 

 above enunciated, is substantially the same as that 

 expressed by Professor Clerk Maxwell, at the close of 

 the very able lecture delivered by him at Bradford in 

 1873. According to both philosophers, the atoms, if 

 I understand aright, are prepared materials, which, 

 formed once for all by the Eternal, produce by their 

 subsequent interaction all the phenomena of the mate- 

 rial world. There seems to be this difference, however, 



