160 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



in matter. In artificial productions the moving prin- 

 ciple 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 unneces- 

 sary. 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 mad- 

 ness 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 material 

 world. There seems to be this difference, however, 

 between Qassendi and Maxwell. The one postulates, 

 the other infers his first cause. In his ' manufactured 

 articles,' as he calls the atoms, Professor Maxwell finds 

 the basis of an induction, which enables him to scale 

 philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, 

 and to take the logical step from the atoms to their 

 Maker 



Accepting here the leadership of Kant, I doubt the 

 legitimacy of Maxwell's logic ; but it is impossible not 



