The Summary of Physics Restored

153We may affirm that Democritus’s opinion, that all bodies are made from atoms, is not foreign to Nature, for reason and experience defend him against slander. That ingenious philosopher wished to veil the mixture of elements in obscure language without concealing it altogether. To agree with Nature’s intention, this mixture must take place through the smallest corpuscles, actually indivisible; otherwise the elements would not coalesce into a continuous natural body. Experience in the artificial resolution and composition of mixed bodies, practised through distillations, teaches us that a perfect mixture of two or more bodies occurs only in a subtle vapour. But Nature makes her own mixtures far subtler and in some measure spiritual, and it is sounder to believe that Democritus understood these. For the grossness of bodies obstructs mixture; therefore, the more things are attenuated, the fitter they become for mixture.