THE BELFAST A DDRESS. 445 



'passed from the super to the sub-sensible. It was felt 

 that to construct the universe in idea, it was necessary to 

 have some notion of its constituent parts of what 

 Lucretius subsequently called the " First Beginnings/' 

 Abstracting again from experience, the leaders of scientific 

 speculation reached at length the pregnant doctrine of 

 atoms and molecules, the latest developments of which 

 were set forth with such power and clearness at the last 

 meeting of the British Association. Thought, no doubt, 

 had long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the 

 precision and completeness which it assumed in the mind 

 of Dernocritus,* a philosopher who may well for a moment 

 arrest our attention. "Few great men," says Lange, a 

 non-materialist, in his excellent "History of Materialism," 

 to the spirit and to the letter of which I am equally 

 indebted, "have been so despitefully used by history as 

 Dernocritus. In the distorted images sent down to us 

 through unscientific traditions, there remains of him 

 almost nothing but the name of ' the laughing philoso- 

 pher/ while figures of immeasurably smaller significance 

 spread themselves out at full length before us." Lange 

 speaks of Bacon's high appreciation of Democritus for 

 ample illustrations of which I am indebted to my excellent 

 friend Mr. Speckling, the learned editor and biographer 

 of Bacon. It is evident, indeed, that Bacon considered 

 Democritus to be a man of weightier metal than either 

 Plato or Aristotle, though their philosophy " was noised 

 and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp of 

 professors." It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and 

 the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy. 

 " For, at a time when all human learning had suffered 

 shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic 

 philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated sub- 

 stance, were preserved and came down to us, while things 

 more solid sank and almost passed into oblivion." 



The son of a wealthy father, Dernocritus devoted the 

 whole of his inherited fortune to the culture of his mind. 

 He traveled everywhere; visited Athens when Socrates 

 and Plato were there, but quitted the city without making 

 himself known. Indeed, the dialectic " strife in which 

 Socrates so much delighted, had no charm for Democritus, 



* Born 460 B. c. 



