Epicurus, equally great as a genius, and respectable in his morals; and after him Lucretius, who forced the Latin language to express philosophical ideas, and — to the great admiration of Rome — to express them in verse — Epicurus and Lucretius, I say, admitted atoms and the void. Gassendi supported this doctrine, and Newton demonstrated it. In vain did a remnant of Cartesianism still combat for the plenum; in vain did Leibnitz, who had at first adopted the rational system of Epicurus, Lucretius, Gassendi, and Newton, change his opinion respecting the void after he had embroiled himself with his master Newton. The plenum is now regarded as a chimera.

In this Epicurus and Lucretius appear to have been true philosophers, and their intermediaries, who have been so much ridiculed, were no other than the unresisting space in which Newton has demonstrated that the planets move round their orbits in times proportioned to their areas. Thus it was not Epicurus’ intermediaries, but his opponents, that were ridiculous. But when Epicurus afterwards tells us that his atoms declined in the void by chance; that this declination formed men and animals by chance; that the eyes were placed in the upper part of the head and the feet at the end of the legs by chance; that ears were not given to hear, but that the declination of atoms having fortuitously composed ears, men fortuitously made use of them to hear with — this madness, called physics, has been very justly turned into ridicule.

Sound philosophy, then, has long distinguished what is good in Epicurus and Lucretius, from their chimeras, founded on imagination and ignorance. The most submissive minds have adopted the doctrine of creation in time, and the most daring have admitted that of creation before all time. Some have received with faith a universe produced from nothing; others, unable to comprehend this doctrine in physics, have believed that all beings were emanations from the Great — the Supreme and Universal Being; but all have rejected the fortuitous concurrence of atoms; all have acknowledged that chance is a word without meaning. What we call chance can be no other than the unknown cause of a known effect. Whence comes it then, that philosophers are still accused of thinking that the stupendous and indescribable arrangement of the universe is a production of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms — an effect of chance? Neither Spinoza nor any one else has advanced this absurdity.

Yet the son of the great Racine says, in his poem on Religion:

O toi! qui follement fais ton Dieu du hasard,

Viens me développer ce nid qu’avec tant d’art,

Au même ordre toujours architecte fidèle,

à l’aide de son bec ma?onne l’hirondelle;

Comment, pour &ea............