are assimilated by the air through which they have to pass, and enter
the soul by pores in its sensitive organs. Hence such images, being
merely of the superficial form, are necessarily imperfect and untrue,
and so, therefore, must be the knowledge yielded by them. Democritus
rejected the one element of the Eleatics, affirming that there must be
many; but he did not receive the four of Empedocles, nor his principles
of Love and Hate, nor the homoeomeriae of Anaxagoras. He also denied
that the primary elements had any sensible qualities whatever. He
conceived of all things as being composed of invisible, intangible, and
indivisible particles or atoms, which, by reason of variation in their
configuration, combination, or position, give rise to the varieties of
forms: to the atom he imputed self-existence and eternal duration. His
doctrine, therefore, explains how it is that the many can arise from the
one, and in this particular he reconciled the apparent contradictions of
the Ionians and Eleatics. The theory of chemistry, as it now exists,
essentially includes his views. The general formative principle of
Nature he regarded as being Destiny or Fate; but there are indications
that by this he meant nothing more than irreversible law.

[Sidenote: Is led to atheism.]

A system thus based upon severe mathematical considerations, and taking
as its starting-point a vacuum and atoms--the former actionless and
passionless; which considers the production of new things as only new
aggregations, and the decay of the old as separations; which recognizes
in compound bodies specific arrangements of atoms to one another; which
can rise to the conception that even a single atom may constitute a
world--such a system may commend itself to our attention for its
results, but surely not to our approval, when we find it carrying us to
the conclusions that even mathematical cognition is a mere semblance;
that the soul is only a finely-constituted form fitted into the grosser
bodily frame; that even for reason itself there is an absolute
impossibility of all certainty; that scepticism is to be indulged in to
that degree that we may doubt whether, when a cone has been cut asunder,
its two surfaces are alike; that the final result of human inquiry is
the absolute demonstration that man is incapable of knowledge; that,
even if the truth be in his possession, he can never be certain of it;
that the world is an illusive phantasm, and that there is no