of matter are deduced from the familiar experience, that certain portions of space affect us in a certain manner; and, consequently, are we not entitled to say there must be something where we experience the difference of up or down? Is there, after all, a very great difference between this argument and that of modern physicists in favour of a plenum, who tell us that matter cannot act where it is not?
Aristotle seems also to have entertained the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body (for that, he says, would be a kind of body), and that therefore light is an energy or act.
The Ideas of the Ancients were not Prolific.
187. These quotations render it evident that the ancients had, in some way, grasped the idea of the essential unrest and energy of things. They had also the idea of small particles or atoms, and, finally, of a medium of some sort. And yet these ideas were not prolific—they gave rise to nothing new.
Now, while the historian of science is unquestionably right in his criticism of the ancients, that their ideas were not distinct and appropriate to the facts, yet we have seen that they were not wholly ignorant of the most profound and deeply-seated principles of the material universe. In the great hymn chanted by Nature, the fundamental notes were early heard, but yet it required long centuries of patient waiting for the practised ear of
