GREEK SCIENCE IN EARLY ATTIC PERIOD 



made up of elementary atoms having a unique person- 

 ality, each differing in quality from all the others. 

 As far as experiment has thus far safely carried us, the 

 atom of gold is a primordial element which remains an 

 atom of gold and nothing else, no matter with what 

 other atoms it is associated. So, too, of the atom 

 of silver, or zinc, or sodium in short, of each and 

 every one of the seventy-odd elements. There are, in- 

 deed, as we shall see, experiments that suggest the 

 dissolution of the atom that suggest, in short, that the 

 Daltonian atom is misnamed, being a structure that 

 may, under certain conditions, be broken asunder. 

 But these experiments have, as yet, the warrant rather 

 of philosophy than of pure science, and to-day we de- 

 mand that the philosophy of science shall be the hand- 

 maid of experiment. 



When experiment shall have demonstrated that the 

 Daltonian atom is a compound, and that in truth there 

 is but a single true atom, which, combining with its 

 fellows perhaps in varying numbers and in different 

 special relations, produces the Daltonian atoms, then 

 the philosophical theory of monism will have the experi- 

 mental warrant which to-day it lacks ; then we shall be 

 a step nearer to the atom of Democritus in one direc- 

 tion, a step farther away in the other. We shall be 

 nearer, in that the conception of Democritus was, in a 

 sense, monistic ; farther away, in that all the atoms of 

 Democritus, large and small alike, were considered as 

 permanently fixed in size. Democritus postulated 

 all his atoms as of the same substance, differing not at 

 all in quality ; yet he was obliged to conceive that the 

 varying size of the atoms gave to them varying func- 



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