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Surely, these facts, so clearly explained by our author, instead of sustaining the corpuscular philosophy, directly militate with it, and afford the most satisfactory proof of the doctrine of the theist, and the theory of continuous divine agency. We have hardly ever met with a book that furnished more complete materials for its own refutation. After all, the question is a very simple one.
* See Sir J. J. Thomson, "The Corpuscular Theory of Matter" and for a more elementary presentment "Light Visible and Invisible" ; and Mr. Such are the discoveries of the last fifteen years and a few of the mathematical deductions from them.
The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular theory of light or Sir G.C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We are wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing.
One must except Democritus and Epicurus, whose corpuscular philosophy combated these dogmas. But let us remark that the Epicureans relied on an entirely erroneous natural philosophy, and that the metaphysical system of all the other philosophers holds good with all the systems of natural philosophy.
The theory of the luminiferous ether as the medium of the transmission of light is one of these pretentious bridges of words. Our advancing knowledge of electro-magnetic phenomena may some day drive us back to a modified form of the corpuscular theory of light, and then we can throw this of the ether to the winds.
His philosophy was much in favour: the sect of the Ramists was powerful in Germany, gaining many adherents among the Protestants, and even concerning itself with theology, until the revival of Corpuscular philosophy, which caused that of Ramée to fall into oblivion and weakened the authority of the Peripatetics.
His mechanical instincts were more to be trusted than his carefully calculated results; for, as all know, what he called "spirits," is what to-day we call the ether, and the corpuscular theory of light has now no more than a historic interest.
People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his 'new philosophy, gave them only a little later their coup de grace. But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing, the corpuscular and etheric world, were essentially more 'true, why should they have excited so much criticism within the body of science itself?
But soon we shall make ourselves eyes more powerful than those which Nature has given us; we shall attain to a sight of the primitive atom, the corpuscular element so persistently sought by the wise and learned of all ages who have preceded us in the glorious search.
It is enough here to remark that according to this definition, the real essence of an object has, in the progress of physics, come to be conceived as nearly equivalent, in the case of bodies, to their corpuscular structure: what it is now supposed to mean in the case of any other entities, I would not take upon myself to define.
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