Ixxviil REvPoRT—1874.. 
retained ; and then Gassendi proceeds, as any heathen might do, 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 atoms, which constituted the seed of all things. 
Then began that series of combinations and decompositions which goes on 
at present, and which will continue in future. The principle of every 
change resides in matter. In artificial productions 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 influ- 
ence 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 cannot be 
touched by the disease. The errors of madness are errors 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 last year. According to both philosophers, the atoms, if I under- 
stand aright, are prepared materials, which, formed by the skill of the Highest, 
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 
logic ; but it is impossible not to feel the ethic glow with which his lecture 
concludes. There is, moreover, a yery noble strain of eloquence in his de- 
scription of the stedfastness of the atoms :—‘ Natural causes, as we know, 
are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the 
arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But 
though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur 
in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems 
evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are 
built—the foundation stones of the material universe—remain unbroken and 
unworn.” 
The atomic doctrine, in whole or in part, was entertained by Bacon, 
Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, and their successors, until the 
chemical law of multiple proportions enabled Dalton to confer upon it an 
entirely new significance. In our day there are secessions from the theory, 
but it still stands firm. Loschmidt, Stoney, and Sir William Thomson 
have sought to determine the sizes of the atoms, or rather to fix the 
limits between which their sizes lie; while only last year the discourses of 
Williamson and Maxwell illustrate the present hold of the doctrine upon 
the foremost scientific minds. In fact, it may be doubted whether, wanting 
this fundamental conception, a theory of the material universe is capable of 
scientific statement, 
