THE BELFAST ADDRESS 171 



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 con- 

 stituted 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 influ- 

 ence 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, con- 

 necting itself, probably, with the deeper mental structure 

 of the two men, that the idea of Gassendi, above enunci- 

 ated, is substantially the same as that expressed by Pro- 

 fessor Clerk Maxwell, at the close of the very able lect- 

 ure 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 



