Atomism, in fact, tends more and
more, in modern theories, to imitate the principle of the conservation
of energy or that of entropy, to disengage itself from the artificial
bonds which attached it to mechanics, and to put itself forward as an
independent principle.
Atomistic ideas also have undergone evolution, and this slow evolution
has been considerably quickened under the influence of modern
discoveries. These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to
follow their development we should have to write the history of human
thought which they have always accompanied since the time of
Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The first observers
who noticed that the volume of a body could be diminished by
compression or cold, or augmented by heat, and who saw a soluble solid
body mix completely with the water which dissolved it, must have been
compelled to suppose that matter was not dispersed continuously
throughout the space it seemed to occupy. They were thus brought to
consider it discontinuous, and to admit that a substance having the
same composition and the same properties in all its parts--in a word,
perfectly homogeneous--ceases to present this homogeneity when
considered within a sufficiently small volume.
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