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The religio which Lucretius hated, and from which he strangely hoped that the atomistic materialism of Epicurus had finally delivered mankind, has its roots in the sombre and confused superstitions of the savage. Fear, as Statius and Petronius tell us, created the gods of this religion.
The year 1861 ends badly European defenders of slavery Secession lies Jeremy Diddlers Sensation-seekers Despotic tendencies Atomistic Torquemadas Congress chained by formulas Burnside's expedition a sign of life Will this McClellan ever advance? Mr.
Atomistic ideas also have undergone evolution, and this slow evolution has been considerably quickened under the influence of modern discoveries. These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to follow their development we should have to write the history of human thought which they have always accompanied since the time of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.
Democracy therefore necessarily implies a republican form of government even though at times, for reasons of expediency, it temporarily adjusts itself to a monarchical régime. Once started on this downward grade of logical deductions it was inevitable that this atomistic theory of state and society should pass on to a more advanced position.
Those great Anglo-American Talleyrands, Metternichs, etc., bring down the clear and large intellect of Louis Napoleon to the atomistic proportions of their own sham brains. I do not mean to foretell Louis Napoleon's policy in future. Unforeseen emergencies and complications may change it.
Therefore the ends of a society, so considered, are nothing more than the ends of the individuals which compose it and for whose sake it exists. An atomistic view of this kind is also necessarily anti-historical, inasmuch as it considers society in its spatial attributes and not in its temporal ones; and because it reduces social life to the existence of a single generation.
The kinetic hypothesis, therefore, remained in some disfavour with a great number of persons, particularly in France, until the last few years, when all the recent discoveries of the conductivity of gases and of the new radiations came to procure for it a new and luxuriant efflorescence. It may be said that the atomistic synthesis, but yesterday so decried, is to-day triumphant.
Observation of the nature of solid matter has led atomistic thought to regard a physical body as a heap of molecules so far apart that by far the greater part of the volume occupied by the body is just 'empty' space.
However, the decline of this vitalistic rationalism coincided with the rise of a mechanistic rationalism which had its roots in ancient Greek atomistic theories of matter.
The case is very different, however, if we turn from these atomistic element hypotheses and direct our attention to the historical conditions of the evolution of the world, as these have been revealed to us by the magnificent advances in our knowledge of nature which have been made within the last thirty years.
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