198 SPECULATIVE SCIENCE 



very different and much more sensible than the vulgar inter- 

 pretation of their doctrine. Lucretius abuses these philosophers, 

 some because they denied a vacuum, a denial which he thought 

 inconsistent with motion, some because their material wanted 

 the character of indestructibility which he thought essential, 

 some because he quite failed to perceive how all things could 

 be made out of the element chosen fire, for instance ; but we 

 must not take Lucretius's account of rival theories as fair ; we 

 may with the exercise of a good deal of fancy see in the doc- 

 trine of homoeomeria, which taught that all things contained the 

 materials of everything else in a latent state, a foreshadowing 

 of the chemical theory which proves that our bodies are made 

 of the same chemical materials as peas, cabbages, &c., but it 

 requires an elastic imagination to link the old and new creed 

 together. Any explanation of the metaphysical conceptions of 

 matter would also be out of place here. To Aristotle the existence 

 of an atom with any properties at all, and the nature of motion, 

 were mysteries demanding, as he says, speculation of a far 

 deeper kind than Democritus and the atomic school attempted. 

 This is true enough, but we think Aristotle and his followers 

 got entangled in the ' snares of words,' to use Hobbes's language, 

 and their teaching led to little or no progress in what we call 

 science. Let us then pass on some two thousand years, and see 

 at the revival of philosophy what some modern great men have 

 taught and written on the possible constitution of matter. We 

 need choose no smaller men than Leibnitz and Descartes to 

 serve as foils to our author. 



Descartes, after a hypocritical flourish to the effect that he 

 knew the complete fallacy of all he was going to say, since it 

 did not agree with the orthodox theory of creation, but still that 

 it would be interesting to consider how God might have created 

 the world if He had been of Descartes's mind as to the simplest 

 way of proceeding, propounds the following plan : 



The universe at first was quite full of something ; it was all 

 alike, and there was no void anywhere. This universal plenum 

 by-and-by was broken up into pieces. The pieces of plenum 

 rubbed against one another till they became quite round : the 

 dust rubbed off their angles filled up the interstices for of 

 course no void could possibly occur once the universe was quite 



