54 NATURE AND LIFE. 
not by weight or motion, but by the direct product of the 
actual play of those forces. ‘‘The energy with which one 
body combines with another body,” says Wiirtz, “is inde- 
pendent of the power it possesses to attract the latter. 
The first is atomicity, the last is affinity.” Atomicities are 
capacities of action, powers of combination, immanent in 
atoms, or rather consubstantial with them. Such is the 
language at this day of the most authoritative chemists. 
They contemplate in bodies elective virtues, tendencies to 
saturation, appetencies which imply something prior and 
subsequent to motion, something like that which in us 
brings about action. Chemistry no longer dwells in ap- 
pearances and sensible forms, in those brilliant shows 
which delight or dazzle the senses; it dwells in those mute 
forces, in those acting monads, the substances of substance, 
the matters of matter. Bodies are no longer characterized 
by their outward and momentary physiognomy alone; 
they are also characterized by that which is most secret 
within them, by the principle of their past and coming ex- 
istence, by a spring which is as inwardly theirs as our soul 
is ours. That in them which strikes our senses is merely 
the veil of their real nature. Faraday and Dumas alike, 
Berthelot and Wiirtz too, here find the whole in a dynamic 
harmony. A distinguished English chemist, lately deceased, 
Graham, the discoverer of dialysis, even went so far as to 
conceive, under the name of ultimates, of certain principles 
yet simpler than atoms, real points of substance, the essence 
of which is determined by the kind of vibrations they are 
subjected to, and in its turn determines the various natures 
of bodies. Thus monads have become, in vital phenomena, 
anatomical elements with their consubstantial attributes, 
and, in chemic phenomena, atoms with their consubstantial 
attributes. Greek atomism and Cartesian atomism formed 
the conception of geometric and mechanical corpuscles; 
Leibnitz formed the conception of the principles of appar- 

