species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites,"[1] were handed over the rule and governance of natural phenomena.
Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in the long-run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race. Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting these anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural phenomena with their physical principles. But, long prior to these purer efforts of the understanding, the merchant had been abroad, and rendered the philosopher possible: commerce had been developed, wealth amassed, leisure for travel and for speculation secured, while races educated under different conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with its Eastern neighbors, the sciences were born, being nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume: "There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all into confusion; mix every thing with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence." Now, as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice and the absolute reliance upon law in Nature, there grew with the growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves.
The problem which had been previously approached from above was now attacked from below; theoretic effort passed from the super-to the sub-sensible. It was felt that to construct the universe in idea it was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts of what Lucretius subsequently called the "First Beginnings." Abstracting again from experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest developments of which were set forth with such power and clearness at the last meeting of the British Association. Thought no doubt had long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision and completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus,[2] a philosopher who may well for a moment arrest our attention. "Few great men," says Lange, in his excellent "History of Materialism," a work to the spirit and the letter of which I am equally indebted, "have been so despitefully used by history as Democritus. In the distorted images sent down to us through unscientific traditions there remains of him almost nothing but the name of the 'laughing philosopher,' while figures of immeasurably smaller significance spread themselves
