ATOMISM.

Almost all authors allow that the Grecian philosopher Leucippus, the place of whose birth is not agreed upon, was the inventor of the Atomical System. We scarcely need pause upon Posidonius

who, according to Strabo, attributes this discovery to a Phoenician philosopher, who lived before the siege of Troy.

Epicurus is blamable for not acknowledging how much he was indebted to the invention of Leucippus, and he is still more blamable for not having better profited by it. But this is a common failing with distinguished 'men; they are reluctant to confess how much they have derived from the notions and lights of others, and would be thought to derive every thing from the brilliancy and strength of their own genius. Epicurus was so ungrateful as even to deny that Leucippus had ever existed.

Lactantius has developed with sufficient force and precision the hypothesis of Atomism, but is guilty of much confusion in his confutation of it. He has employed all his abilities to put down the doctrine of Leucippus, as to the origin, direction, and qualities of atoms. He has succeeded in his first point, but is pitiable in his second. The epithets of madman, dreamer, or visionary, may be due to whoever imagines that a fortuitous concourse of infinite corpuscles produced the world, and is the continuous source of generation; but to apply the same epithets to men who maintain that all bodies are formed from various combinations of atoms, is to prove the absence of all idea of, or taste for, natural philosophy. It must be confessed that in the following words, Lactantius advances good and bad objections, and confounds what he ought to distinguish. He first asks when and whence are those seeds, by whose fortuitous concourse it is pretended that the world is created. “ Who ever saw them; who ever perceived or heard them? Had Leucippus alone eyes or understanding? rather, he alone of all men was blind and stupid who talked of things more vain and empty than a sick man’s dreams. The ancient philosophers taught that all things were made out

of four elements. Leucippus would not allow it, that he might not seem to tread in the steps of others; but of the elements themselves he pretended that some were primordial, which could neither be touched, seen, nor felt by any part of the body, and others so small, that there is no edge fine enough to divide them, whence the name of atoms. Here, however, an objection arose, for if they were all of the same nature they could not form the various things we see in the world. He pretended, therefore, that they were smooth, rough, round, cornered, and hooked. How much better to have said nothing, than to have talked so vaguely and miserably. How extravagant,” continues Lactantius. “If these atoms are smooth and round they cannot unite into one body; just as if we should endeavour to unite millet into one mass; the very smoothness of the grains would prevent a coalition. If they are rough, and cornered, and hooked, that they may be capable of adhering together, then they must be likewise divisible and friable, for they must have hooks and points, which may be cut off, and what may be cut off and torn away may be both seen and felt.”

A man would be laughed at in our days who should make such objections, for ever since the banishment of the chimerical qualities invented by the schoolmen, the only alternative is the admittance of insensible parts in matter, whose figure, angles, hooks, motion, and situation, constitute the particular essence of the bodies which strike our senses. Lactantius has committed the fault of ascribing the same fault both to the figures of the atoms, and to their fortuitous concourse. The modems have distinguished better; they reject the eternity of atoms, and their fortuitous concourse, but preserving in all other respects the hypothesis of Leucippus, make a consistent system of it. The objections of Lactantius against the indivisibility of

atoms are the weakest that can be objected to Leucippus: the followers of Aristotle and Descartes propose much stronger. But after all they prove nothing more than the possible division of all sorts of extension; for as to actual opinion, all sects are obliged to stop somewhere. It is plain that there are necessarily innumerable corpuscles which are never divided, and this alone is sufficient to invalidate the objections of Lactantius.

To judge more rationally of the system of Leucippus, we must attend to the opinion of Dr. Thomas Burnet. This learned man observes that Leucippus and Democritus, the zealous propagators of the system of atoms, were illustrious and gifted men, whose hypotheses, though false, gave occasion to philosophize more strictly and accurately. These philosophers did not look for the principles of bodies, or their power of acting amongnumbers, proportions, harmonies, ideas, qualities, orelementary forms, as others have done, but went to the bodies themselves, and examined their physical and mechanical states, motion, figure, situation of parts, smallness or magnitude, and the like; and from these they estimated the virtues of each, defined their actions, explained their effects, and that so far rightly and solidly. But when they proceeded to call these parts indivisible, to give them a tendency to certain places, and lastly, to be disunited in empty space, these and the like suppositions were not only without foundation, but contrary to reason. However this may be, since they opened a more sound method of reasoning upon natural bodies, and, in this respect, deserved well of the world, let us not rob them of the praise which is due to them.

Let us therefore allow that the system of Atoms is by no means so weak as many other theories,

and that it is not so absurd as Spinosism. The Atomists acknowledge at least a real distinction between the things that compose the universe. It is not incomprehensible, upon their theory, that whilst it is cold in one country it is hot in another, and that whilst one man enjoys a perfect health, another should be sick; while in Spinosism, according to which the whole universe is but one substance, it is a perfect contradiction. Supposing an infinite number of atoms to exist, distinct from each other, and all essentially endowed with an active principle, one may conceive the action and reaction, and the continual alterations that happen in nature: but when there is but one principle, there can be no action and reaction, nor any alteration. So that he who departs from the right way, which is the system of a God, who freely created the world, must necessarily admit of a multiplicity of principles, acknowledge antipathies and sympathies among them, and suppose them independent from each other as to their existence and power of acting, and yet capable to annoy each other by action and reaction. Ask not why, in certain cases, the effect of reaction is rather this than that; for no reason can be given for the properties of a thing, but when it has been made freely by a cause that had some reasons and motives in producing it.

I have often wondered why Leucippus, Epicurus, and other celebrated Atomists, never were led to suppose that each atom possessed an inherent vital principle. This supposition would have delivered them from a great part of their perplexity, and there is as much foundation for it as for the eternity and inherent motion which they attribute to these indivisible corpuscles. They might then have had some sort of answer to the objection which they have never been able to solve, that

Plutarch proposes to Colotes the epicurean, and which has been urged with great force by Galen. It consists in this; that every atom being destitute of a soul and sensitive faculty, no combination of atoms can become an animate and sensitive being. But if every atom had a soul and sensation, we might easily conceive how a combination of atoms should make a compound capable of certain particular modifications, as well with respect to consciousness and sensation, as with respect to motion. The diversity observable betwixt the passions of rational and irrational creatures, might in general be explained by these different combinations of atoms. It is, therefore, very surprising, though Leucippus overlooked the interests of his system in this point, that those who came after him should be so blind as never to have added so material an article; for the easiness of improving the inventions of others, and the stress of the dispute, might very well have enabled them to carry their views farther than Leucippus had done.

We have reason to believe that Democritus had in some measure remedied in this manner the faults in this hypothesis. St Augustine allows us not to doubt that he assigned a soul to every atom, which is confirmed by the testimony of Plutarch: “ Democritus supposes that all things are endued with some kind of soul, even carcasses themselves, for as much as they manifestly partake of some degree of heat and sensation, the greatest part being evaporated.” But as none of Democritus’s writings are preserved to us, it is no easy matter to give a just and exact summary of his thoughts on this head; and besides, we know that this notion has not been followed by the sect of the Atomists. Neither Epicurus nor his successors ever maintained that atoms were endued with life or sense,

and they have considered the soul as a compound of several parts.

The Atomist would have found another great advantage in the hypothesis of animate atoms; for their indivisibility might have furnished some answers to an insurmountable objection, which their opinion is exposed to, who maintain that matter may think, that is, be capable of sensation and consciousness. This objection, which is founded on the unity, properly so called, which must belong to thinking beings, gravels the ancient epicureans and modern materialists; but if they had been induced to give a soul to every atom, they would thereby have united thought to an indivisible subject, and they had as good ground to suppose atoms animated, as to suppose them uncreated, and endued with a moving virtue. It is as difficult to conceive this virtue in an atom, as that of sensation. Extension and solidity constitute the whole essence of an atom in our idea. The power of moving is not included in it. It is as foreign and independent of body and extension, as that of consciousness. Why then, since the Atomists suppose in their corpuscles a self-moving force, would they rob them of thought? I know they could not have avoided all difficulties, by arbitrarily ascribing it to them; they might still have been pressed with invincible objections. Yet there had been some glory in parrying a thrust here and there. Let us observe, that very great philosophers have made the principal properties of the soul to consist in a self-moving power. It is by this attribute they have characterized and defined it. Would any one then have thought it strange, that they who gave atoms the principle of motion should also give them a soul?

Let us observe that there was a sect of philosophers in the east, who admitted the hypothesis of

atoms and a vacuum, with this amendment, that God had created these atoms. The famous Rabbin, Maimonides, speaks at large of this sect of philosophers. They were called, “ the Speakers.” They principally exercised themselves on these four points: 1.That the world is not eternal. 2. That it was created. 3. That its creator is one.4. That he is incorporeal. This Rabbi mentions the twelve principles they laid down for their foundation. The second of which was, that there is a void, and the third, that time is made up of indivisible instants. It does not appear that their atoms were like those of Leucippus; for they gave them no magnitude, and made them all exactly alike. Maimonides presses them hard on their being forced to deny that one moveable went faster than another, and that the diagonal of a square was longer than one of its sides. These difficulties obliged them to say that the senses deceive us, and that we must trust to our reason alone. Some even went so far, as to deny the existence of a square figure. Let us say, by the by, that they might have retorted these difficulties, and let us challenge all the patrons of divisibilityin infinitum,to answer the arguments which prove that the diagonal of a square is not longer than one of the sides. For the rest, these Arabian philosophers supposed in part what I have said Leucippus ought to have done; they taught that every atom of animate bodies was animated, and every atom of sensitive bodies sensitive; and that the understanding resided in an atom. There was no dispute amongst them on this point; but as to the soul, they divided into two opinions about it: some said it was lodged in one of the atoms, of which man, for example, is composed. Others compounded it of many very subtile substances. They were divided much the same as to knowledge. Some placed it in a single atom, and others in each of the atoms which constitute the knowing person.—Arts.DemocritusandLeucippus.