single universal being-substance.[7] In a certain sense we can regard the
conception of "animated atoms" as essentially partaking of the nature of
this pure monism--a very ancient idea which more than two thousand years
ago Empedocles enunciated in his doctrine of "hate and love of the
elements." Modern physics and chemistry have indeed in the main accepted
the atomic hypothesis first enunciated by Democritus, in so far as they
regard all bodies as built up of atoms, and reduce all changes to
movements of these minutest-discrete particles. All these changes,
however, in organic as well as in inorganic nature, become truly
intelligible to us only if we conceive these atoms not as dead masses,
but as living elementary particles endowed with the power of attraction
and repulsion. "Pleasure" and "pain," and "love" and "hate," as
predicates of atoms are only other expressions for this power of
attraction and repulsion.

Although, however, monism is on the one hand for us an indispensable and
fundamental conception in science, and although, on the other hand, it
strives to carry back all phenomena, without exception, to the mechanism
of the atom, we must nevertheless still admit that as yet we are by no
means in a position to form any satisfactory conception of the exact
nature of these atoms, and their relation to the general space-filling,
universal ether. Chemistry long ago succeeded in reducing all the various
natural substances to combinations of a relatively small number of
elements; and the most recent advances of that science have now made it
in the highest degree probable that these elements or the (as yet)
irreducible primitive materials are themselves in turn only different
combinations of a varying number of atoms of one single original element.
But in all this we have not as yet obtained any further light as to the
real nature of these original atoms or their primal energies.