LECTURES AND ESS A YS 



repugnance to accepting it is manifest in 

 Carlyle. 1 



The analytic and synthetic tendencies 

 of the human mind are traceable through- 

 out history, great writers ranging them- 

 selves sometimes on the one side, some- 

 times on the other. Men of warm 

 feelings, and minds open to the elevating 

 impressions produced by nature as a 

 whole, whose satisfaction, therefore, is 

 rather ethical than logical, lean to the 

 synthetic side; while the analytic har- 

 monises best with the more precise and 

 more mechanical bias which seeks the 

 satisfaction of the understanding. Some 

 form of pantheism was usually adopted 

 by the one, while a detached Creator, 

 working more or less after the manner of 

 men, was often assumed by the other. 

 Gassendi, as sketched by Lange, is 

 hardly to be ranked with either. Having 

 formally acknowledged God as the great 

 first cause, he immediately dropped the 

 idea, applied the known laws of mechanics 

 to the atoms, and deduced from them 

 all vital phenomena. He defended 

 Epicurus, and dwelt upon his purity, 

 both of doctrine and of life. True he 

 was a heathen, but so was Aristotle. 

 Epicurus assailed superstition and re- 

 ligion, and rightly, because he did not 

 know the true religion. He thought 

 that the gods neither rewarded nor 

 punished, and he adored them purely in 

 consequence of their completeness : here 

 we see, says Gassendi, the reverence of 

 the child, instead of the fear of the slave. 

 The errors of Epicurus shall be corrected, 

 and the body of his truth retained. 

 Gassendi then proceeds, as any heathen 

 might have done, to build up the world, 

 and all that therein is, of atoms and 

 molecules. God, who created earth and 

 water, plants and animals, produced in 

 the first place a definite number of 



1 Boyle's model of the universe was the Stras- 

 burg clock with an outside Artificer. Goethe, 

 on the other hand, sang : 



" Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 

 Natur in sicb, sich in Natur zu hegen." 



See also Carlyle, Past and Present, chap. v. 



atoms, which constituted the seed of all 

 things. Then began that series of com- 

 binations and decompositions which 

 new goes on, and which will continue in 

 future. The principle of every change 

 resides in matter. In artificial produc- 

 tions the moving principle is different 

 from the material worked upon ; but in 

 nature the agent works within, being the 

 most active and mobile part of the 

 material itself. Thus this bold ecclesiastic, 

 without incurring the censure of the 

 Church or the world, contrives to outstrip 

 Mr. Darwin. The same cast of mind 

 which caused him to detach the Creator 

 from his universe led him also to detach 

 the soul from the body, though to the 

 body he ascribes an influence so large as 

 to render the soul almost unnecessary. 

 The aberrations of reason were, in his 

 view, an affair of the material brain. 

 Mental disease is brain-disease; but then 

 the immortal reason sits apart, and can- 

 not be touched by the disease. The 

 errors of madness are those of the instru- 

 ment, not of the performer. 



It may be more than a mere result of 

 education, connecting itself, probably, 

 with the deeper mental structure of the 

 two men, that the idea of Gassendi, 

 above enunciated, is substantially the 

 same as that expressed by Professor 

 Clerk Maxwell, at the close of the very 

 able lecture delivered by him at Bradford 

 in 1873. According to both philoso- 

 phers, the atoms, if I understand aright, 

 are prepared materials, which, formed 

 once for all by the Eternal, produce by 

 their subsequent interaction all the 

 phenomena of the material world. There 

 seems to be this difference, however, 

 between Gassendi and Maxwell. The one 

 postulates, the other infers, his first cause. 

 In his " manufactured articles," as he 

 calls the atoms, Professor Maxwell finds 

 the basis of an induction which enables 

 him to scale philosophic heights con- 

 sidered inaccessible by Kant, and to 

 take the logical step from the atoms to 

 their Maker. 



Accepting here the leadership of Kant, 

 I doubt the legitimacy of Maxwell's 



