216 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



science and philosophy. The doctrines, however, 

 which have met with most general acceptance re- 

 garding the origin and constitution of the universe, 

 can be reduced to a few typical and comprehensive 

 classes. 



First of all, comes the Materialism of Leucippus 

 and Democritus, of Heraclitus and of Empedocles, 

 of Epicurus and the philosophers of the Ionian 

 school. The only reality they recognized was matter.. 

 Simple atoms, infinite in number, eternal and uncre- 

 ated, moving eternally in avoid infinite in exteni^are, 

 of themselves, the only postulate demanded by mate- 

 rialists to explain the universe and all the phenom- 

 ena which it exhibits. It excludes the intervention 

 dfan intelligent cause, and attributes all life and 

 thought to the mere interaction of the ultimate 

 atoms of brute matter. Morality, according to this 

 teaching, is but " a form of the morality of pleasure," 

 religion is the outcome of fear and superstition, and 

 God the name of a being who has no existence out- 

 side of the imaginations of the ignorant and the self- 

 deceived. 



Materialism, as is obvious, is but another name 

 for Atheism, and is a blank negation of creation as 

 well as of God. " Rigorously speaking," as M. 

 Caro well observes, " Materialism has no history, 

 or, at least, its history is so little varied that it can 

 be given in a few lines. Under what form soever it 

 presents itself, it is immediately recognized by the 

 absolute simplicity of the solutions which it proposes. 

 Contemporary Materialism has in nowise changed 

 the framework of this philosophy of twenty centuries' 



