sensations as the impressions produced by images which emanated from external objects.

He could not, of course, overlook the obvious question, Why do the atoms move, and how do they so combine as to give rise to a world at once so orderly and varied? He answered that nothing happened at random, but everything according to law and necessity; that the atoms were infinite in number and endlessly diversified in form; and that in falling through boundless space they dashed against each other, since the larger ones moved more rapidly than the smaller; and that, rebounding and whirling about, they formed aggregates, vortices, worlds, without number. He thus sought to banish from nature every notion of a final cause and supreme ordaining Mind, and to substitute for them a purely mechanical, unconscious, aimless necessity. He referred the popular conceptions of Deity partly to an incapacity to understand fully the phenomena of which we are witnesses, and partly to the impressions occasioned by atmospheric and stellar phenomena. He thus laid the foundation and drew the plan of a system of atheistical materialism which is sometimes. presented to us as the most important creation of modern science.

A system like this manifestly contains in itself the germs of its own contradiction and destruction. It tends necessarily to sensationalism and scepti

cism, and both of these devour, as it were, the mother which begat them. If matter be the sole source and substance of the universe, sensation must be due to the impression of matter on matter, and thought must be but an elaboration of sensation, with no truth or reality in it beyond what it derives from sensation. But in that case what do we know of matter? Nothing at all: we know merely our own sensations of colour, of hearing, of smell, &c., and conjecture, for some mysterious reason or other, that these are the results of material objects acting on a material subject. Democritus saw this, that there was no heat or cold out of relation to feeling, no bitter or sweet out of relation to the sense of taste, no colour independent of the sense of sight, or sound independent of that of hearing. He granted that all that our senses inform us about things is purely relative to the senses of the individual-is not what things are in themselves, but what they appear to be to the particular person whose senses are affected. He supposed only space and the atoms to be real. But what evidence had he as a materialist and sensationalist for his atoms? None of his senses could apprehend them; and although sense was so little to be trusted, there was nothing on his principles, and can be nothing on materialistic principles, equally to be trusted, or, indeed, to be trusted at all, apart from it. Thus Demo

critus was virtually affirming that there was all truth in sensation, and that there was no truth. in it. No wonder that he said truth lay at the bottom of a well and was hard to find. No wonder that men came after him who said that there was no such thing as truth; that there was nothing for reason save appearance and opinion, and no higher law of life than worldly prudence.

The speculations of Democritus, it cannot be doubted, contributed not a little to the inauguration of the era of the Sophists. The men who are known in history under this designation are now generally admitted to have been until recently represented as even worse than they were. They may certainly be credited with having rendered service to logic, and still more to rhetoric -with having awakened a critical and inquiring spirit-and with having contributed very considerably to the increase of ideas and the spread of intellectual culture. Whatever merits, however, we may thus assign to them, will not warrant us to reverse or do more than unessentially modify the verdict which history so long unhesitatingly pronounced against them. They were not men who sought or found, who believed in or loved truth. Their fundamental principles, so far as they had any, were that sense is the source of all

1 See Appendix VIII.

thought-that man is the measure of all things -that nothing is by nature true or false, good or bad, but only by convention. It seemed to

Socrates and to Plato that these principles were erroneous, and must involve in ruin, reason, virtue, and religion, the individual soul and society; and they made it their mission in life to refute them, and to prove that directly contrary principles are to be held; that thought underlies sense-that the soul is better than the body-that there are for all men who would search for them, a truth and goodness which are not individual and conventional, but universal and eternal-that the search for them is the prime duty of man-and that the finding of them is his distinctive dignity and glory.

The idea which Anaxagoras had introduced into Greek philosophy-the idea, that the order in the universe could only be accounted for by the working of an Eternal Reason was welcomed by Socrates, and shaped with admirable art into the theistic argument which is most offensive to materialism, the design argument for the existence of God from the evidences of design in nature, and especially in the animal frame. Plato strove to show that all phenomena presupposed eternal ideas, and that these gradually led up to the Supreme Idea—the highest good-God. Aristotle was scarcely less opposed to materialism than Plato, and in his theory of causes he constructed a

fortress which all the forces of materialism have, down to this day, assailed in vain. Unfortunately, neither Plato nor Aristotle was able to raise himself to the sublime thought which seems to us so simple-the thought of absolute creation, of creation out of nothing by an act of God's omnipotent will. Both granted to matter a certain independence of God; both believed it to be in itself uncreated. Both failed, in consequence, to gain a complete and decisive victory over materialism. Perhaps, also, their philosophies were too large and many-sided to find a lodgment in ordinary minds. Certain it is that they were followed by greatly inferior systems, which, owing in part, perhaps, to their very superficiality and narrowness, acquired no small popularity.

One of these systems was substantially just the philosophy of Democritus revived and developed. Epicurus, its author, was by no means what he boasted himself to be-a " self-taught man," an original thinker-but he had the qualities which enabled him to render his views widely popular. In his lifetime he gathered around him multitudes of friends. His memory was cherished by his followers with extraordinary veneration; in fact, they paid to him the same sort of idolatrous homage which Comte yielded to Madame Clothilde de Vaux, J. S. Mill to his wife, and certain Comtists to their master. Worship is natural to man, and when cut