NATURE 



513 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1897. 



HISTORY OF ATOMIC PHILOSOPHY. 



Histoire de la Philosophie Atomistiqtie. Par Leopold 

 Mabilleau, Professeur de Philosophie k la Faculte des 

 Lettres de Caen. 8vo. Pp. vii + 560. (Paris : F^lix 

 Alcan, 1895.) 



\LL things considered/ it seems probable that God, 

 in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, 

 liard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes, 

 tigures, and with such other properties, and in such 

 proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for 

 which He formed them ; and that these primitive par- 

 ticles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any 

 porous bodies compounded of them ; even so very hard 

 as never to wear or break to pieces ; no ordinary power 

 being able to divide what God himself made one in the 

 first creation. 



"While the particles continue entire, they may compose 

 bodies of one and the same nature and texture in all 

 ages ; but should they wear away, or break in pieces, 

 the nature of things depending on them would be 

 changed. Water and earth composed of old worn 

 particles would not be of the same nature and texture 

 now with water and earth composed of entire particles 

 at the beginning. And therefore, that nature may be 

 lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed 

 inly in various separations, and new associations, and 

 motions of these permanent particles ; compound par- 

 ticles being apt to break, not in the midst of solid 

 jiarticles, but where these particles are laid together 

 and touch in a few points." 



This statement of Newton's unites in a singularly 

 complete fashion the various aspects of the atomic 

 theory of which M. Mabilleau has given us a history in 

 560 large octavo pages. The author begins with a 

 study of Kanada's theory, as examined by Colebrooke in 

 his "Essays." Proceeding to the history of the subject 

 in Greece, he leaves us in some doubt as to the precise 

 influence of these earlier Hindu doctrines on the various 

 (.reek cosmogonies which, as he shows, developed in a 

 natural and logical sequence in the hands of Thales, 

 .\naximenes, Anaximander, Pythagoras, the Eleatic 

 School, and Heraclitus, into a body of doctrines from 

 which Leucippus and his disciple Democritus created 

 the atomic theory, in a form but little different from that 

 adopted centuries later by Newton. For Democritus, as 

 for the modern chemist, composition was a union of 

 atoms, and decomposition a separation of atoms, and 

 matter, consisting ultimately of these atoms, was in- 

 destructible. 



We have no space to follow M. Mabilleau in his 

 detailed account of the modifications of the doctrine of 

 Democritus by Epicurus ; of its criticism by Aristotle ; 

 its revival in poetic form by Lucretius ; and of the 

 monotheistic atomic theory of the Motecallemin in the 

 Middle Ages, so fiercely attacked by Maimonides in his 

 "Guide for the Strayed." There are, indeed, two 

 aspects of the atomic theory (sufficiently apparent in 

 the quotation from Newton given above) which, though 



1 " Newton's Opticks," 2nd edit. (1768), Query 31, p. 375. 



NO. 1457, VOL. 56] 



perhaps not fundamentally separable, may yet be studied 

 separately : the cosmical aspect, which offers us a hypo- 

 thetical history of the universe ; and the physical aspect, 

 which offers us a hypothetical interpretation of actual 

 phenomena. The study of the former aspect involves 

 questions of religion and ethics, to which M. Mabilleau 

 very rightly devotes considerable attention ; but we 

 ^have neither the space nor the competence to follow 

 him far on this ground. The interest of the atomic 

 theory from the scientific point of view begins again* 

 after Epicurus, with the alchemists, who are claimed by 

 the author as more or less conscious atomists ; a view 

 which might be discussed. But the great return to the 

 theory came, of course, with the Renaissance and the 

 return to the reading of Greek philosophers in the ' 

 original. M. Mabilleau dismisses contemptuously the 

 claims put forward by Lasswitz * for the Italians Giordano 

 Bruno, Cardan, and Telesio as advocates of various 

 forms of the theory, but, curiously enough, omits to 

 mention Galileo, who can hardly be passed over in this 

 connection.'^ 



Bacon, already in the "Novum Organum " (1621) 

 declared Democritus to have been the greatest philo- 

 sopher of antiquity, but M. Mabilleau agrees with both 

 Lange ^ and Lasswitz (and opposes Pillon and others), in 

 regarding Gassendi's development of the doctrine of 

 Democritus and Epicurus in the second quarter of the 

 seventeenth century as the real turning point in its 

 history, •♦ and he even thinks that Gassendi's claims 

 have been somewhat underrated hitherto ; but if this is 

 so, it is rather as a precursor of what M. Mabilleau 

 calls Leibniz's " pan-psychical " monadology, than as a 

 figure in the history of science. 



Opposing Descartes' identification of matter with 

 extension, Gassendi adopted the idea of solid, impene- 

 trable and indivisible atoms, created in the beginning 

 with certain properties as regards their movement in 

 space, which control their future destinies completely ; in 

 addition he attributed to them a certain limited sensi- 

 bility. 



Gassendi is important from the scientific point of view, 

 because he influenced Boyle,'' who speaks of him in 

 terms of sincere admiration. 



We must remember that Boyle was the author of the 

 modern theory and definition of the elements (a fact 

 which M. Mabilleau, in his philosophic conviction that 

 all matter is ultimately identical, passes over in silence) ; 

 and that the conception of chemical combination, which 

 has resulted from Dalton's theory, is thus really trace- 

 able to Boyle : though, as Roscoe and Harden have shown 

 recently, it was, in its inception, due directly to the 

 " Newtonian doctrine of repulsive atoms or particles." " 



Very possibly, as M. Mabilleau thinks, Newton took 

 Gassendi's doctrine from Boyle. To Newton's own view 

 M. Mabilleau attributes the greatest importance, for he 

 finds in him the mainstay of the atomic theory in its 



1 In his able and learned " Geschichte Uer Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis 

 Newton " 



■■i Op. cit. ii. 37 sqq. 



» In his " History of M.aterialism," translated by K. C. Thomas. 



* Lasswitz says : " Eswardieser Rflckgriffauf die antike Atomistik, wenn 

 er auch fiir die Geschichte der Philosophie keinen ncuen Gedanken enthalt, 

 dock tin schdpftriscke That in der Geschichte der Physik." 



5 See, in Boyle's works, "Considerations . . . touching the origin of 

 forms," and especially vol. ii. p. 48^ (folio edition). 



« Rtwcos and Warden's " New View of the Atomic Theor>-," p. 14 (pub- 

 lished after M. Mabilleau's work). 



