EDMUND MONTGOMERY-ARE WE CONSCIOUS AUTOMATA? 
69 
middle of the 16th century, in protestant Geneva, there were tortured 
and put to death, on account of witchcraft and heresy, in the space of 
three months onty, 500 persons. And all this pious holocaust of fellow- 
men was religiously and conscientiously offered up to please a vengeful 
demon, created by the cruel fancy of barbarous ancestors. 
It can, therefore, not be deemed devoid of interest to let pass in rapid 
survey the principal steps by which the chaos of capricious influences 
once believed to have constituted and controlled nature, was eventually 
converted into the conception of an ordered cosmos, whose occurences, 
without exception, follow unswervingly the rules of natural causation. 
True, this wholesome transfiguration was effected under the penalty 
of being ourselves scientifically reduced to a state of conscious automat¬ 
ism. But, perhaps, a more comprehensive, though no less verifiable, 
view of nature may enable our thought consistently to remove the im- 
' pediment which mechanical causation seems to oppose to our volitional 
exertions. At all events, such an attempt shall here finally be made. 
The modern scientific era was initiated not, as is often asserted, by 
Lord Chancellor Bacon, who remained to the last steeped in mediaeval 
superstition, though at times he dabbled in natural experimenting, and 
insisted upon inductive, instead of deductive, methods of knowledge; it 
was, in truth, initiated by Gassendi’s revival of Greek atomism. The 
defense by this pious prelate of the atomic physics of Epicurus, pub¬ 
lished in 1647, was the momentous event which set rolling the irre¬ 
sistible. all-involving scientific avalanche. 
Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibnitz, and their followers, in rapid suc¬ 
cession, succeeded in applying the mechanical laws of corpuscular, or 
atomic, motion to divers phenomena of nature, physical, chemical and 
physiological. In the year 1660 the Boyal Society of London for Im¬ 
proving Natural Knowledge was founded. In 1661 Boyle published his 
“Chemista Scepticus,” by which alchemy was laid to rest for evermore. 
Newton entered the Boval Society in 1681. His “Principia” were com¬ 
posed during the years 1685 and 1686. 
The heliocentric view of our planetary system, enunciated as a hy¬ 
pothesis by Copernicus, and proved to be a fact by Galileo’s 
astronomical discoveries, inspired the ardent spirit of Giordano 
Bruno to arise to the sublime conception of a boundless uni¬ 
verse, boundlessly peopled with harmoniously moving worlds. 
At that time, when our own tiny globe was universally be¬ 
lieved to be the only existing world upon which all divine solicitude 
was exclusively centered, this minimizing of our mundane importance 
was considered a dangerous, all-subverting heresy. Despite of it, in op¬ 
position to the rigorously canonized geocentric tenet, the ineffable mag¬ 
nificence and infinite vastness of the new world-conception fired with 
