hemical) sciences can make and use their formulas most
easily under the supposition of such simple primitive elements; but it also
has the great theoretical merit that it has broken down the old barriers
between _matter_ and _force_, and has thus promoted considerably our method
of regarding the world of material substances. Toward this result,
scientists and philosophers--and, among the latter, the thinkers and
investigators of both views of the world, the theistic and the pantheistic,
the ideal and the materialistic,--have worked with equal merit, and have
equally enjoyed its fruits, with perhaps the single exception of so pure a
materialist as Ludwig Buechner, who, it seems, does not like to give up his
old doctrine of force _and_ matter as the two inseparable, equivalent, and
equally eternal elements of the universe. That matter itself, even when
looked upon from a purely physical standpoint, has an incorporeal
principle; that the whole world of bodies, as such, has but a phenomenal
character; that not force _and_ matter are the two empirico-physical
principles of the world, but that matter itself must be a product of
elementary {142} force active in the atoms; these doctrines have now be
pretty nearly common property of natural science and philosophy.
Investigators who like Wilhelm Wundt, rise from natural science to
philosophy, or such as take their starting-point from philosophy--whether
they be theists, like Lotze, I. H. Fichte, Ulrici, or occupy the ground of
a pessimistic pantheism, as does Eduard von Hartmann,--all share this view
and its fruits.

But in spite of all these preferences for the theory of atoms, we should
not forget that it still has but hypothetical value--that it is but an idea
of limits, which indicates, where the scientifically perceptible ceases,
and that every attempt at moving this limit still farther on must either
fail and lead into unsolvable contradictions, or, if successful, only leads
to new difficulties and unsolved problems.

Already within that realm in which the theory of atoms is a supplemental
hypothesis directly indispensable at present--_i.e._, within their
application in physical sciences--we meet suppositions which raise great
doubts and difficulties. Such a scientific difficulty occurs when the
atomism of the natural philosophers supposes a double complexity of atoms,
material atoms and atoms of ether: complexities which both penetrate one
another, and are supposed to fol