4 62 FRA GMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



mind are traceable throughout history, great writers ranging 

 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 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. 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. Gassendi, 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; 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 



