THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. 27 



ancient. "All was chaotic," Anaxagoras of Clazomene 

 said; " an intelligence intervened, and regulated all." Pla- 

 to, after defining matter as an existence very hard to under- 

 stand, an eternal place, never perishing, and furnishing a 

 stage for whatever begins to be, not the subject of sense 

 and yet perceptible, and of which we only catch glimpses 

 as in a dream, tells us that the supreme ruler " took this 

 mass which was whirling in unchecked and unguided move- 

 ment, and made order come out of disorder." And this 

 ordering grows real in conformity with ideas, the proto- 

 types of things, whose totality makes the divine essence 

 itself. The world's activities are reflections - of God's 

 thoughts. To these two fundamental notions, that of at- 

 omism and that of idealism, Aristotle added a third, that 

 of dynamism. As he holds, indeterminate matter, in the 

 highest degree of abstraction, is without attributes. If it 

 tends always toward form and action, that is because it 

 contains a principle of power, a force. Force is, in Aris- 

 totle's view, the principle of form. The latter is actually 

 existent. We have here the whole ancient philosophy 

 regarding the world. Modern philosophy has taught us 

 nothing different. Atomism, strengthened and widened 

 by Descartes, and borrowed from him by Newton, is iden- 

 tical at bottom with that held by the teachers of Epicurus. 

 In the same way, Leibnitz's dynamism is only a revival 

 of Aristotle's. And, just as Descartes and Leibnitz repro- 

 duce the old Greek masters, contemporary science renews 

 Descartes and Leibnitz. 



" But what ! " it will be said ; " always repeating, 

 never inventing, must that be the fixed doom of meta- 

 physics ? " Not so ; these renewals contain continuous 

 growth toward perfection. The old truth has been pre- 

 served, in its original sense, but it has been constantly 

 illuminated and made exact in the lapse of time by happy 

 efforts of speculative genius. Greek atomism left an im- 



