The following Book of this Work is interesting and most instructive as an instance of Syncretism, and its Epicurean 'clinamen', even when it has been undertaken from the purest and most laudable motives, and from impulses the most Christian, and yet its utter failure in its object, that of tending to a common centre.

For even in the Lucretian, the coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated 'lene clinamen' becoming actual.

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

If motion in a straight line be essential to bodies, nothing can bend, nor consequently join them, in all eternity; the clinamen destroys the very essence of matter, and those philosophers contradict themselves without blushing.

Without the clinamen the straight line can never produce anything, and the Epicurean system falls to the ground; with the clinamen, a fabulous poetical invention, the direct line is violated, and the system falls into derision and ridicule.

Without the clinamen the straight line can never produce anything, and the Epicurean system falls to the ground; with the clinamen, a fabulous poetical invention, the direct line is violated, and the system falls into derision and ridicule.

Both the straight line and the clinamen are airy suppositions and mere dreams; but these two dreams destroy each other, and this is the upshot of the uncurbed licentiousness some men allow themselves of supposing as eternal truths whatever their imagination suggests them to support a fable; while they refuse to acknowledge the artful and powerful hand that formed and placed all the parts of the universe.

To reach the highest degree of amazing extravagance, the Epicureans have had the assurance to explain and account for what we call the soul of man and his free-will, by the clinamen, which is so unaccountable and inexplicable itself.

What can they find in the clinamen that, with any colour, can account for the liberty of man?

The clinamen, as we have already shown, is manifestly impossible: but, contrary to evident truth, supposing it to be possible, in such a case it must be affirmed that the clinamen is no less necessary, immutable, and essential to atoms than the straight line.

The clinamen, as we have already shown, is manifestly impossible: but, contrary to evident truth, supposing it to be possible, in such a case it must be affirmed that the clinamen is no less necessary, immutable, and essential to atoms than the straight line.

Is it not manifest that the clinamen can no more account for it than the straight line itself?

The clinamen, supposing it to be true, would be as necessary as the perpendicular line, by which a stone falls from the top of a tower into the street.

However, the will of man, according to the principle of the clinamen, has no more freedom than that stone.