32 



ON THE ELEMENTARY AND CONSTITUENT 



or receding farther from each other, by an application of different degrees 

 of cold or heat. We can, hence, it is said, form no conception of perfect 

 solidity ; and every phaenomenon in nature appears to disprove its exist- 

 ence. The minutest corpuscle we can operate upon is still capable of a 

 minuter division, and the parts into which it divides possessing the common 

 nature of the corpuscle which has produced them, must necessarily, it is 

 added, be capable of a still farther division ; and as such divisions can have 

 no assignable limit, matter must necessarily and essentially be divisible to 

 infinity. 



Such was the reasoning of Des Cartes, and of the numerous host of 

 philosophers who attached themselves to his theory about the middle 

 of the seventeenth century. The argument, indeed, is highly plausible ; 

 but it was soon obvious, that, like the Grecian incorporiety of matter, it 

 leads to a pure nonentity of a material world : for that which is essentially 

 unsolid and infinitely divisible, must at length terminate in nothing. And 

 hence, Leibnitz attempted to amend the system, about half a century, and 

 Boscovich, about a century afterwards, by contending, as indeed Zeno is 

 supposed to have done formerly, that matter has its ultimate atoms, or 

 monads, as they were denominated by Leibnitz, from the language of 

 Pythagoras, beyond which it is altogether indivisible ; and that these ulti- 

 mate atoms or monads are simple inextended points, producing, however, 

 the phaenomenon of extension, by their combination, and essentially possest 

 of the powers of attraction and repulsion. 



There is such a charm in novelty, that it often leads us captive in de- ^ 

 spite of the most glaring errors, and intoxicates our judgment as fatally as 

 the cup of Circe. It is upon this ground alone we can account for the 

 general adoption of this new system, when first proposed in its finished 

 state by Boscovich, and the general belief that the Gordian knot was at 

 length fairly untied, and every difficulty overcome. It required a period of 

 some years for the heated imagination to become sufficiently cool to enable 

 mankind to see, as every one sees at present, that the difficulties chargea- 

 ble upon the doctrine of an infinite divisibihty of matter are not touched by 

 the present theory, and remain in as full force as before its appearance. If 

 the monads, or ultimate points of matter here adverted to, possess body, 

 they must be as capable of extension, and consequently of division, as ma- 

 terial body under any other dimension or modification ; if they do not- pos- 

 sess body, then they are as much nonentities as the primal or amorphous 

 matter of Plato or Pythagoras. Again, we are told that these points or 

 monads are endowed with certain powers ; as those, for example, of attraction 

 and repulsion. But powers must be the powers of something ; what is 

 this something to which these powers are thus said to appertain ? if the 

 ultimate and inextended points before us have nothing but these powers, 

 and be nothing but these powers, then are such powers powers of nothing, 

 powers without a substrate, and, consequently, as much nonentities as on 

 the preceding argument. Visible or sensible matter, moreover, it is ad- 

 mitted by M. Boscovich and his disciples, is possessed of extension ; but 

 visible or sensible matter is also admitted to be a mere result of a combiria- 

 tion of inextended atoms : — how can extension proceed from what is in- 

 extended ? — of two diametrical opposites, how is it possible that either 

 can become the product of the other ? 



It is unnecessary to pursue this refutation. The lesson which the whole 

 of such fine-spun and fanciful hypotheses teach us, and teach us equally, 

 is, that it is impossible to philosophize without a firm basis of first principles. 

 We must have them in physics as well as in metaphysics,— in matter as 



