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Updated: August 24, 2024
Corpuscular philosophy, introduced shortly after, appears to have extinguished this excessively Peripatetic sect, or perhaps to have been intermixed with its teaching.
Enough of the latter is fresh in recollection to make it but an equivocal compliment to a physiological position, that it must stand or fall with the corpuscular philosophy, as modified by the French theory of chemistry. For it is not cum hoc solo, ergo propter hoc, which would in many cases supply a presumptive proof by induction, but cum hoc, et plurimis aliis, ergo propter hoc!
"It would also be requisite not to entrust command," Montaigne says, "to men who would fly from apples more than from arquebusades." It is not only amongst the corpuscular emanations of living animals that the Mesmerists asserted conflicts to occur. They unhesitatingly extended their speculations to dead bodies.
The corpuscular theory was a mechanical conception, but each such corpuscle was ideally endowed with qualities which were out of all relation with the ordinary matter with which it was classed. Until the middle of the present century the reigning physical philosophy held to the existence of what were called imponderables.
Emerson's philosophy will hardly eradicate from the wayside. Even the most refined empiricism will find it difficult to stomach his stomachic theory of the universe, which lands all atomic or corpuscular philosophy in a digestive sac, such as Jack Falstaff bore about him with its measureless capacity for potations and Eastcheap fare. It is a road too in which Mr.
Newton's corpuscular theory of light was of much temporary use in optics, though nobody now believes in it; and the undulatory theory, which has superseded the corpuscular theory and has proved one of the most fertile of instruments of research, is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an 'ether, the properties of which are defined in propositions, some of which, to ordinary apprehension, seem physical antinomies.
Then Young applied the wave theory to the explanation of polarization and other phenomena; and in 1851 Foucault proved experimentally that the velocity of light was less in water than in air, as it should be if the wave theory be true, and this has been considered a crucial experiment which took away the last hope for the corpuscular theory, and demonstrated the existence of the ether as a space-filling medium capable of transmitting light-waves known to have a velocity of 186,000 miles per second.
Various observations incline us to believe that, in their ordinary form of minute, soft, exuberant rods, the vibrios perish when submitted to desiccation, but when they occur in corpuscular or encysted form they possess unusual powers of resistance and may be brought to the state of dry dust and be wafted about by winds.
The 'negative electric fluid, to use the old notation, resembles the gaseous fluid with a corpuscular instead of a molecular structure." Professor Thompson does not hesitate to declare that we now "know more about 'electric fluid' than we know about such fluids as air or water."*3* The results of his studies lead him, he declares, "to a view of electrification which has a striking resemblance to that of Franklin's One Fluid Theory of Electricity.
The discovery of their protective function is to be credited to Metchnikoff, a Russian physician now teaching in Paris. When they migrate from the blood vessels in great numbers they finally, after having fulfilled their office as phagocytes, degenerate into the corpuscular elements of pus, which is the creamy liquid contained in an abscess. Their migratory power was discovered by Cohnheim.
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