Let us still attend the Epicureans even in their most fabulous suppositions, and carry on the fiction to the last degree of complaisance.  Let us admit motion in the essence of bodies, and suppose, as they do, that motion in a direct line is also essential to all atoms.  Let us bestow upon atoms both a will and an understanding, as poets did on rocks and rivers.  And let us allow them likewise to choose which way they will begin their straight line.  Now, what advantage will these philosophers draw from all I have granted them, contrary to all evidence?  In the first place, all atoms must have been in motion from all eternity; secondly, they must all have had an equal motion; thirdly, they must all have moved in a direct line; fourthly, they must all have moved by an immutable and essential law.

I am still willing to gratify our adversaries, so far as to suppose that those atoms are of different figures, for I will allow them to take for granted what they should be obliged to prove, and for which they have not so much as the shadow of a proof.  One can never grant too much to men who never can draw any consequence from what is granted them; for the more absurdities are allowed them, the sooner they are caught by their own principles.

Sect.  LXXXIV.  Atoms cannot make any Compound by the Motion the Epicureans assign them.

These atoms of so many odd figures—­some round, some crooked, others triangular, &c.—­are by their essence obliged always to move in a straight line, without ever deviating or bending to the right or to the left; wherefore they never can hook one another, or make together any compound.  Put, if you please, the sharpest hooks near other hooks of the like make; yet if every one of them never moves otherwise than in a line perfectly straight, they will eternally move one near another, in parallel lines, without being able to join and hook one another.  The two straight lines which are supposed to be parallel, though immediate neighbours, will never cross one another, though carried on ad infinitum; wherefore in all eternity, no hooking, and consequently no compound, can result from that motion of atoms in a direct line.

Sect.  LXXXV.  The Clinamen, Declination, or Sending of Atoms is a Chimerical Notion that throws the Epicureans into a gross Contradiction.

The Epicureans, not being able to shut their eyes against this glaring difficulty, that strikes at the very foundation of their whole system, have, for a last shift, invented what Lucretius calls clinamen—­by which is meant a motion somewhat declining or bending from the straight line, and which gives atoms the occasion to meet and encounter.  Thus they turn and wind them at pleasure, according as they fancy best for their purpose.  But upon what authority do they suppose this declination of atoms, which comes so pat to bear up their system?  If motion in a straight line be essential to bodies, nothing can bend, nor