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Every single growth and movement is linked by him with the endless chain of causes and effects. He surely reshapes the experience in connecting every single impression with the totality of events, in finding the general in the particular, in transforming the given facts into the scientific scheme of an atomistic universe. It is not different from the historical event.

Society becomes thus a sum of determined individuals, viz., the generation living at a given moment. This doctrine which I call atomistic and which appears to be anti-historical, reveals from under a concealing cloak a strongly materialistic nature.

For this purpose they placed at the basis of their speculations not the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, the former uncreated and continuous, but adopted the atomistic theory of Democritus, denied the necessity of cause and effect and the validity of natural law, and made God directly responsible for everything that happened every moment in life.

Knowing that the appearance of electricity depends on a process of atomization of some sort, we shall expect that where electricity becomes freely observable, it will yield phenomena of an atomistic kind. The observations of electricity in a vacuum, therefore, yield no confirmation whatsoever of the atomistic view of matter.

He accepted, therefore, from common sense the belief that physical reality is composed of a multitude of separate existences that act on one another, and tried to conceive mental life strictly on the same analogy. His theory of experience, therefore, closely parallels the atomistic theory of matter.

The atomistic hypothesis shows itself remarkably fecund in the study of phenomena produced in gases, and here the mutual independence of the particles renders the question relatively more simple and, perhaps, allows the principles of mechanics to be more certainly extended to the movements of molecules.

Lincoln, he is pure, and has no despotical longings, but he has around him some atomistic Torquemadas.

In their minds not only social order, but existence itself, was at stake. And they were right. Egoistic individualism is necessarily atomistic. No society can long maintain its life as a unified and peaceful society, when such a principle has been widely accepted by its members.

The common basis of all these doctrines, which stretch from Longuet, from Buchanan, and from Althusen down to Karl Marx, to Wilson and to Lenin is a social and state concept which I shall call mechanical or atomistic. Society according to this concept is merely a sum total of individuals, a plurality which breaks up into its single components.

He would have witnessed a prodigious budding of atomistic ideas, accompanied, it is true, by wide modifications in the manner in which the atom is to be regarded, since the most recent theories make material atoms into centres constituted of atoms of electricity.