les. God, who created earth
and water, plants and animals, produced in the first place a definite
number of atoms, which constituted the seed of all things. Then began
that series of combinations and decompositions which now goes on, and
which will continue in future. The principle of every change resides
in matter. In artificial productions the moving principle is
different from the material worked upon; but in nature the agent works
within, being the most active and mobile part of the material itself.
Thus this bold ecclesiastic, without incurring the censure of the
church or the world, contrives to outstrip Mr. Darwin. The same cast
of mind which caused him to detach the Creator from his universe, led
him also to detach the soul from the body, though to the body he
ascribes an influence so large as to render the soul almost
unnecessary. The aberrations of reason were, in his view, an affair
of the material brain. Mental disease is brain disease; but then the
immortal reason sits apart, and cannot be touched by the disease. The
errors of madness are those of the instrument, not of the performer.

It may be more than a mere result of education, connecting itself,
probably, with the deeper mental structure of the two men, that the
idea of Gassendi, above enunciated, is substantially the same as that
expressed by Professor Clerk Maxwell, at the close of the very able
lecture delivered by him at Bradford in 1873. According to both
philosophers, the atoms, if I understand aright, are prepared
materials, which, formed once for all by the Eternal, produce by their
subsequent interaction all the phenomena of the material world. There
seems to be this difference, however, between Gassendi and Maxwell.
The one postulates, the other infers his first cause. In his
'manufactured articles,' as he calls the atoms, Professor Maxwell
finds the basis of an induction, which enables him to scale
philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the
logical step from the atoms to their Maker.

Accepting here the leadership of Kant, I doubt the legitimacy of
Maxwell's logic; but it is impossible not to feel the ethic glow with
which his lecture concludes. There is, moreover, a very noble strain
of eloquence in his description of the steadfastness of the atoms:
Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they
do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the
earth and the