rapidity from all eternity, since the vacuum offers no more resistance to the lightest than it does to the heaviest.)
“Among the atoms, some are separated by great distances, others come very near to one another in the formation of combined bodies, or at times are enveloped by others which are combining; but in this latter case they, nevertheless, preserve their own peculiar motion, thanks to the nature of the vacuum, which separates the one from the other, and yet offers them no resistance. The solidity which they possess causes them, while knocking against one another, to re-act the one upon the other; till at last the repeated shocks bring on the dissolution of the combined body; and for all this there is no external cause, the atoms and the vacuum being the only causes.”
(He says, further on, that the atoms have no peculiar quality of their own, except from magnitude and weight. As to colour, he says in the twelfth book of his Principia, that it varies according to