The two illustrious moderns, Newton and Gassendi, attribute the
continual change which happens in bodies to the different figure and
magnitude of their minute corpuscles; and affirm, that their different
junction or separation, and the variety of their arrangement, constitute
the differences of bodies. This corpuscular philosophy can be traced
from the times of Democritus, to its founder Moschus the Phœnician. It
does not appear that the Phœnician school admitted the indivisibility of
atoms; whereas, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus did. And so the
philosophers in all ages, down to the Cartesians and Newtonians, admit
the same. Aristotle, as great in metaphysics as able in mathematics,
treats of it in his works of both kinds. A modern proposition respecting
it has been deemed new, although anciently it was expressed in almost
the very same terms.
The Newtonians say, “that the smallest parcel of matter is able to cover
the largest extent of space, by the number of parts into which it may be
divided; and that without so much as leaving any one pore of the
smallest dimension uncovered.” Anaxagoras had previously said, that each
body, of whatever size, was infinitely divisible; insomuch, that a
particle so small as the half of the foot of the minutest insect, might
furnish out of itself parts sufficient for covering an hundred million
of worlds, without ever becoming exhaustible as to the number of its
parts. Democritus expressed the like proposition, when he affirmed that
it was “possible to make a world out of an atom.” Chrysippus says the
same, when he maintains that a drop of wine may be divided into a number
of parts, each of itself sufficient to mingle with all the small
particles of the ocean.