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Updated: May 21, 2025
For it is clear, that if the ether is admitted to be a continuous material substance, Democritic atomism is at an end and Cartesian continuity takes its place.
Moreover, Hume's analysis made havoc of all idea, of 'causation. If every sensation was a separate being, how was it to be connected with any other in any regular or necessary connection? Two events related as 'cause' and 'effect' must be a myth. These subversive consequences of his theory Hume did not conceal, though he did not push his mental 'atomism' to its logical extreme.
Highmore's theory of development appears to have emerged directly out of his observations of development. In this sense, his theory rests upon a more solid base than does the developmental theory of Digby. His theory is a mixture of vitalism and atomism, designed to eliminate the "fortune and chance" resident in Digby's concept. "Generation," he says,
The developed mind has an elaborate body; but the least developed mind has still some body, or it would lack any mirror whatever through which to represent the world. This means, in effect, that Leibniz's system is not an unmitigated spiritual atomism.
Such a scientific difficulty occurs when the atomism of the natural philosophers supposes a double complexity of atoms, material atoms and atoms of ether: complexities which both penetrate one another, and are supposed to follow partly totally different, partly the same, elementary laws of force.
Accident in the sense of brute fact had to be acknowledged even by the tidiest and most dogmatic atomism of the last century. That atomism must allow it to be accidental, in this sense, that the space surrounding any given atom was occupied by other atoms in a given manner.
In the meanwhile, the gradual reception of the undulatory theory of light necessitated the assumption of the existence of an 'ether' filling all space. But whether this ether was to be regarded as a strictly material and continuous substance was an undecided point, and hence the revived atomism, escaped strangling in its birth.
In a very profound work which appeared a few years ago, entitled Essai critique sur l'hypothese des atomes, M. Hannequin, a philosopher who is also an erudite scholar, examined the part taken by atomism in the history of science.
Thus atomism, which is, perhaps, only an appearance containing even some contradictions, is yet a well-founded appearance, since it conforms to the laws of our minds; and this hypothesis is, in a way, necessary.
Taurellus's philosophy of nature, recognizing the relative truth of atomism, makes the world consist of manifold simple substances combined into formal unity: he calls it a well constructed system of wholes. A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom.
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