ON ANCIENT AND MODERN SKEPTICS. 



415 



physics should have proved just as adverse to it: thus reviving, as we 

 have already seen, the very same double assault to which it had been ex- 

 posed at Athens, shortly after the establishment of the Academy. This 

 latter controversy commenced and hinged upon what are the real qualities 

 of matter. Heat, cold, colours, smell, taste, and sounds, had been pretty 

 generally banished from the list about the middle of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury. Locke contended, after Sir Isaac Newton, for solidity, extension, 

 mobility, and figure : but it was soon found that there is a great difficulty 

 in granting it solidity ; that the particles of bodits never come into actual 

 contact, or influence each other by the means of objective pressure ; that 

 Iiovvever apparently solid the mass to which they belong, such mass may 

 be reduced to a smaller bulk by cold, as it may be increased in bulk by 

 heat ; that we can hence form no conception of perfect solidity, and every 

 fact in nature appears to disprove its existence. The minutest corpuscle 

 we can pick out is capable of a minuter division, and the parts into which 

 it divides possessing the common nature of the corpuscle which has pro- 

 duced them, must necessarily 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. For these and similar reasons M. 

 Boscovich contended that there is no such thing as solidity in matter ; nor 

 any thing more than simple, unextended, indivisible points, possessing the 

 powers of attraction and repulsion, yet producing extension by their com- 

 bination.* 



Upon the self-contradiction of this hypothesis I have found it necessary 

 to comment on a former occasion ;t and shall now, therefore, only fur- 

 ther observe that it just as completely sweeps the whole of matter aWay 

 with a physical broom, as the systems of Berkeley and Hume do with a 

 metaphysical ; for, by leaving us nothing but inextended points, possessing 

 mere powers without a substrate, it leaves nothing at all, — a world indeed, 

 but a world without form, and void with darkness, not only upon the 

 face of the deep, but there and every where else. 



" That nothing," says Dr. Reid, can act immediately where it is not, 

 I think must be admitted ; for I think, with Sir Isaac Newton, that power 

 without substance is inconceivable." Lord Karnes, however^ in his Ele- 

 ments of Criticism, though a strong advocate for the common-sense sys- 

 tem, expresses his doubts of the doctrine contained in this passage. 



To complete the folly of the age, and fix the laugh of the simple against 

 the wise, while Berkeley, Hume, and Boscovich were thus in their differ- 

 ent ways, dissipating the world of matter, in favour of the world of mind, 

 another set of philosophers started up, — 



■ ' ' ■ impios 

 Titanas, immaaemque turmam, |; 



An impious, earth-born, fierce, Titanic race,— • 



and put to flight the world of mind in favour of the world of matter. 

 Hobbes, who was a contemporary, and friend of Des Cartes, courageously 

 led the van, and did ample justice, and somewhat more than ample justice, 

 to the senses, by contending that we have no other knowledge than what 



* Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, Vien. 1758i 



t Series I. Lect. III. See also Dr. WoUaston's paper " On the finite extent of the At- 

 mosphere," Phil. Trans. 1822. p. 89. 

 X Hor. lib. iii. 4, 



