PRINCIPLES OF THINGS. 



29 



the minds of any of those learned and ingenious chemists who ha"fe chiefly 

 been employed in applying and building up the discovery. And it is not 

 the least important part of this discovery, that not only in the union or 

 separation of simple substances, but in all well-known and more compli- 

 cated compounds, so far as the experimental series has been carried, the 

 elementary bodies which enter into them exhibit proportions equally defi- 

 nite and invariable ; thus affording another proof of close connexion be- 

 tween the phaenomena of nature and the occasional developements of 

 revelation ; the philosopher beholding now, as the prophet beheld formerly, 

 that the Almighty Architect has hterally adjusted every thing by weight 

 and measure ; that he has measured the waters and meted out the heavens, 

 accurately comprehended the dust of the earth, weighed the mountains in 

 scales and the hills in a balance. 



LECTURE III. 



ON THE ELEMENTARY AND CONSTITUENT PEINCIPLES OF THINGS. 



(The subject continued.) 



The few steps we have hitherto taken in the wide and magnificent 

 scope before us have only led to an estabhshment of two or three funda- 

 mental axioms, of no small importance in the science of physics, and to a 

 developement of two or three of the most ingenious and most popular 

 hypotheses of former times, invented to account for the origin of the world 

 around us, and the elementary and constituent principles of things ; espe- 

 cially the hypothesis of numbers, as proposed by Pythagoras, and that of 

 ideas, as proposed by Plato ; and their apphcation to primary and incor- 

 poreal matter, in order to endow it with form and quality. There are yet 

 two or three other hypotheses upon the same subject that amply demand 

 our attention, and are replete with an equal degree of ingenuity and fine 

 imagination ; especially the Peripatetic and the Atomic, or that of Artstotle 

 and that of Epicurus ; and we have also to trace out the relative degree of 

 influence which each of these has exerted on the philosophical theories of 

 later times. 



Aristotle had too much penetration not to see that the hypothesis of 

 Plato was just as inadequate as that of Pythagoras to a solution of the 

 great question concerning the production of the visible world : and he 

 proposed a third scheme, which has also had its share of popularity. Ac- 

 cording to this remodelled plan, the sensible universe is the result of four 

 distinct principles, — intelligence, matter, form, and privation ; which last 

 term is little more than a mere synonym for space or vacuum ; and thus 

 far the theory of Aristotle chiefly differs from that of Plato, by interweaving 

 into it his fourth principle, derived from Democritus, and the other Atomic 

 philosophers, and which he seems to have added to it with a view of pro- 

 viding a proper theatre for the two principles of form and matter to move 

 in. He supposes all these to have equally existed from eternity ; and the 

 three last to have been eternally acted upon or thrown into a definite series 

 of motions, upon which alone the existence and harmony of things are 

 dependent, by the immutable and immaterial principle of intelligence, 

 whose residence he places in the purest and loftiest sphere or circle of the 



