XLVI PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
stream, through the pores of the solidest matter) as a very good 
analagon for the racing atoms of Epicurus. : 
It is, however, in his essay entitled an “Attempt to make chemi- 
ical experiments useful to illustrate the notions of the corpuscular 
philosophy,” * that he approaches this discussion with a bold front. 
He there says: “ The corpuscular doctrine, rejecting the substantial 
forms of the schools, and making bodies to differ but in magnitude, 
figure, motion, or rest, and situation of their component particles, 
which may be always infinitely varied, seems much more favorable 
to the chemical doctrine of the possibility of working wonderful 
changes and even transformations in mixed bodies. . . . As 
many chemical experiments may be happily explicated by the cor- 
puscularian notions, so many of the corpuscularian notions may be 
commodiously either illustrated or confirmed by chemical experi- 
ments.” + 
It will be seen at once, in the very dialect and purport of such 
language, that we have reached, even in Boyle, a turning point of 
,the whole Atomic Philosophy. His words import that we are to use 
“the corpuscularian notions” to explicate chemical experiments, 
and that, in turn, the corpuscularian notions may find a new and 
solid basis in chemical experimentation. Men have changed their 
whole Welt-Anschauung, as compared with that of the Greeks in 
the days of Epicurus, before such processes of thought and such 
instruments or methods of enquiry become possible. It is only as 
the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns that 
they take in, or can take in, those wider horizons and deeper vistas 
of truth which are opened to the human mind by the ascending 
hierarchies of the physical sciences. We have now passed the 
border-line which separates the metaphysico-physical atoms of Epi- 
curus from the physico-metaphysical atoms of modern chemical 
science. 
I can afford to pass over this part of my story sicco pede, for 
we shall henceforth have to deal only with the atoms required by 
the hypotheses of positive and experimental science to explain the 
actual facts and processes of nature, not as those facts and processes 
lie on the surface of things, but as extorted from the very bosom 
* Robert Boyle’s Works, vol. I, p. 354. 
f Ibid., pp. 358, 359. 
