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'Planets and the pale populace of heaven,

The mind of man, and all that's made to soar.'

A philosophy, a metaphysic, and a cosmogony were linked together in a single plan. Its author distinguished in matter three gradations of fineness. The coarsest kind was that composing the earth and other opaque bodies; the more sublimated materials of the sun and stars came next; finally, there was the ethereal substance of the skies, so delicately constituted as to be luminous or luminiferous. This last variety was regarded as of subordinate origin. It represented, in fact, a kind of celestial detritus. Interstellar space had gradually become filled with intangible dust, the product of molecular attrition among originally angular solar and stellar particles. Ether was thus supposed to bear to the subtlest description of ordinary matter very much the same sort of relationship that ions presumably do to atoms.

Enough has been said to show that the Cartesian universe was based on crude atomism. Its mode of construction, moreover, evinced a total disregard of mechanical principles. Yet some acquaintance with the laws of motion was by that time easily within reach. The first of the three, at any rate, had been unmistakably enounced by Galileo in 1632, and Descartes himself strongly championed its validity. Yet he thought it necessary, in order to keep the planets moving, to immerse them in one great self-gyrating vortex centred on the sun, each being further provided with a similar subordinate whirlpool for the maintenance of its domestic system. Comets were left in a singularly anomalous position. They circulated freely on the whole, their exemption from planetary restrictions being tacitly recognized; nevertheless, they took advantage of every encountered swirl to help themselves on towards their destination.