ATOMIC THEORY. 407 



the acts of creation, or actually brought into existence by the 

 power which has thus moulded it ? Whether, if eternal,, its 

 nature be not such as to limit and constrain this power, 

 which has framed from it the order of things we see around 

 us ? * Wonderful we may well deem it that man should be 

 gifted with a spirit able to propound these and other like 

 subtleties to itself. But true philosophy consists in setting a 

 boundary between these vague impracticabilities, and that 

 great field of observation and experiment which the Creator 

 has privileged man to work in, by giving him faculties fitted 

 for this wiser and better labour. 



All that can rightly be called atomic philosophy the 

 investigation of matter in its molecular parts, and under the 

 different combinations and mutual actions of these comes 

 distinctly within this field of legitimate enquiry. Yet here, 

 too, rash speculation had a long period of supremacy. We 

 have already alluded to those hypotheses of the Greek 

 philosophers, through which, unaided by experiment, they 

 sought to explain the multiform shapes, combinations, and 

 changes which matter assumes or undergoes. They saw, as 

 it was easy to see, that for such an explanation it must be 

 supposed divisible into parts of exquisite minuteness : since 

 under no other conception than this are the phenomena of 

 possible fulfillment. It was further seen (and almost by the 

 same necessity) that these minute parts, molecules, or atoms, 

 must have definite relations, whether of attraction or repul- 

 sion, to one another. All nature, animate or inanimate, 

 teems with evidence to this effect, and no experiment was 

 needed to attest it. The conception of definite proportions 

 in their molecular relations now ripened into a great 



* Other speculators again, more purely Oriental in character, assign to matter 

 an actual inherent malignity of nature, opposing itself to what is good in crea- 

 tion, and thence bringing evil into the world. The doctrines of the Chaldeans, 

 of Zoroaster, and of the Indian mythologies, are all based more or less on 

 this conception. 



