The Every-day Book and Table Book. v. 3 (of 3) / Everlasting Calerdar of Popular Amusements, Sports, Pastimes, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs and Events, Incident to Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, in past and Present Times; Forming a Complete History of the Year, Month, and Seasons, and a Perpetual Key to the Almanac

by William Hone

7. Science consists in the knowledge, not of individuals, but of kinds or species.

8. This knowledge differs from that of things existing externally.

9. Forms or ideas, as they exist in God, escape the observation of men.

10. Hence men perceive nothing perfectly.

11. Our mental notions are but the shades or resemblances of ideas.

Of Animated Nature.—Buffon.

Buffon’s theory respecting universal matter, generation, and nutrition, so much resembles what was taught by some of the ancients, that it is difficult not to think that his ideas drew their origin from that first school. It appears indeed, that he had attentively read the ancients, and knew how to value them. He says himself, that “the ancients understood much better, and made a greater progress in the natural history of animals and minerals, than we have done. They abounded more in real observations; and we ought to have made much better advantage of their illustrations and remarks.” Yet Buffon does not seem to have perceived the analogy which every where reigns between his system and that of the ancients.

Anaxagoras thought that bodies were composed of small, similar, or homogeneous particles; that those bodies, however, admitted a certain quantity of small particles that were heterogene, or of another kind; but that to constitute any body to be of a particular species, it sufficed, that it was composed of a great number of small particles, similar and constitutive of that species. Different bodies were masses of particles similar among themselves; dissimilar, however, relatively to those of any other body, or to the mass of small particles belonging to a different species. Thus, the ancients taught, that blood was formed of many drops or particles, each of which had blood in it; that a bone was formed of many small bones, which from their extreme littleness evaded our view; and these similar parts they called ομοιομερειας similaritates. Likewise, that nothing was properly liable to generation, or corruption, to birth, or to death; generations of every kind, being no other than an assemblage of small particles constituent of the kind; and the destruction of a body being no other than the disunion of many small bodies of the same sort, which always preserving a natural tendency to reunite, produce again, by their conjunction with other similar particles, other bodies of the same species. Vegetation and nutrition were but means employed by nature for the continuation of beings; thus, the different juices of the earth being composed of a collection of innumerable small particles intermixed, constituting the different parts of a tree or flower for example, take, according to the law of nature, different arrangements; and by the motion originally impressed upon them, proceed till, arriving at the places destined and proper for them, they collect themselves and halt, to form all the different parts of that tree or flower; in the same manner as many small imperceptible leaves go to the formation of the leaves we see, many little parts of the fruits of different kinds to the composition of those which we eat; and so of the rest. The same, with respect to the nutrition of animals. The bread we eat, and the other aliments we take, turn themselves, according to the ancients, into hair, veins, arteries, nerves, and all the other parts of our body; because there are, in those aliments, the constituent parts of blood, nerves, bones, hair, &c. which, uniting with one another, make themselves by their coalition perceptible, which they were not before, because of their infinite littleness.

Empedocles believed, that matter had in it a living principle, a subtile active fire, which put all in motion; and this Buffon calls, by another name, “organized matter, always active; or animated organic matter.” According to Empedocles, “this matter was distributed through the four elements, among which it had an uniting force to bind them, and a separating to put them asunder; for the small parts either mutually embraced, or repelled one another; whence nothing in reality perished, but every thing was in perpetual vicissitude.”

Empedocles had a sentiment, which Buffon follows, in the same terms; where he says, that “the sexes contain all the small parts analogous to the body of an animal, and necessary to its production.”