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When I apply'd my Self to consider, how the cause of Whiteness might be explan'd by Intelligible and Mechanical Principles, I remembred not to have met with any thing among the Antient Corpuscularian Philosophers, touching the Quality we call Whiteness, save that Democritus is by Aristotle said to have ascrib'd the Whiteness of Bodies to their Smoothness, and on the contrary their Blackness to their Asperity.
Needham's book is dedicated to Robert Boyle, whose Sceptical Chymist set the cadence for subsequent research based upon the "mechanical or corpuscularian" philosophy and quantitative procedures. It is appropriate for us, then, to terminate our discussion with a consideration of this current in English embryological thought.
I have here instanced in the corpuscularian hypothesis, as that which is thought to go furthest in an intelligible explication of those qualities of bodies; and I fear the weakness of human understanding is scarce able to substitute another, which will afford us a fuller and clearer discovery of the necessary connexion and co-existence of the powers which are to be observed united in several sorts of them.
Nothing would be more easy than, by the ordinary principles of sound logic and common sense, to demonstrate the impossibility and expose the absurdity of the corpuscularian or mechanic system, or than to prove the intenable nature of any intermediate system.
They still remain, one and all, as elements or simple bodies, though, on the principles of the corpuscularian philosophy, nothing can be more improbable than that they really are such; and no reason has or can be assigned on the grounds of that system, why, in no one instance, the contrary has not been proved.
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