these were deduced from experiment and the use of
instruments, the factors which in the hands of Galileo and his great
successors in all civilized nations, destroyed and are still destroying
the old mythical conception of the world. In astronomy they overthrew
the catholic tenet of the geocentric constitution of the heavens; they
shattered the spheres in which they were confined, opened infinite
space, and peopled it with an infinite number of stars, and in the
attraction of gravity they discovered the universal law of motion in the
firmament. Thus all the mythical representations of the system of the
world, whether Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, or Biblical, vanished for ever,
and the great zoomorphic body of the universe was dissolved; to be
replaced by worlds circulating in infinite space, subject to the laws of
number and of geometry.

Measure, weight, and proportion were applied to all celestial and
terrestrial phenomena, and physics, chemistry, and all the organic
sciences became the manifestation of facts, of observed and calculated
laws, arranged in a natural order, and in this way an immense advance
was made in all branches of science. The history of mankind, first
regarded as the arbitrary arrangement of a superior being, as it was
formulated in the teaching of Judaism and Christianity, had its own laws
in the facts of which it consisted, and thus the mythical conception
which endowed it with personal life was dissolved. The origin of things
was explained by this method of observation, and by these positive
conceptions; the records which had hitherto been regarded as a divine,
extrinsic revelation came to be considered as simple documents, in which
truth was to be separated from the myth which obscured and encompassed
it. So by degrees, from fact to fact, from analysis to analysis, by
observation, experiment, and decomposition, the rational, mechanical
explanation arose and gathered strength. The generation of things, the
variety of phenomena and their order, were derived from the primitive
chemical atom, and from the various changes of form and rapidity of
motion to which they are subjected. The old conception of atoms, which
had never been forgotten, and which had unconsciously swayed and
influenced the minds of men, reappears; but it reappears transformed by
observation, by weight and measure and experiment, and it has become a
science instead of a simple speculation. The atomistic evolution of the
ancients, acce