Atomism has been part of our culture for so long and has been so forcefully endorsed by modern science that it is easy to overlook what a bizarre idea it is. After all, no Greek atomist ever saw an atom. By their very nature atoms were invisible. The ancient philosophers had no idea how atoms might stick together. Was it by means of tiny hooks, perhaps? Fifteen centuries later, when atomism was revived in the days of Galileo and Newton, atoms remained as speculatively nonempirical as ever. They were never "found"; they were conjectured into existence. They were as completely hypothetical as the six biblical days of creation. Newton had no trouble assimilating them into scripture. "God in the beginning," he proclaimed, "formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles." The authors of Genesis would have raised no objection. They could easily have accommodated Newton's' "corpuscular philosophy." And God said, "Let there be atoms."

In the early nineteenth century, the English chemist John Dalton seized upon atoms as a way of making chemistry mathematical. Atoms could, in principle, be weighed and counted. That made them a good basis for calculating chemical formulas. Dalton's work on atomic combining laws (how atoms stick together) and the creation of Gregor Mendeleyev's periodic table seemed to bring the Newtonian world order to its grand culmination. The periodic table, which now hangs in the front of every high school chemistry lab, suggested that the only difference between the elements was a matter of weight. Quality could be reduced to quantity.

It was all marvelously simple. Atoms gave the visible world a purely physical foundation. They supposedly moved in response to the same mechanical laws that neatly predicted the movements of the heavenly bodies. There was a difference, of course. Heavenly bodies could be seen; atoms could not. But atoms offered something more valuable than visibility. Finality. They were the bedrock of reality. Religiously inclined scientists might wish to believe that God had created the atoms and set them in motion, but atheists were just as free to assert that atoms were eternal and required no God to make or move them. In either case, there was nothing more to explain in nature beyond them or below them. That was what made them "basic."

The Catholic catechism I memorized in childhood began with the question "Who made the world?" The answer was "God." The next question was "Who made God?" The answer was "nobody made God. God always was." Atheists have long chastised theologians for failing to explain where God came from. Why stop there? they ask. But atoms reside at exactly the same cutoff point in atheist ideology: "Nobody made atoms; atoms always were." If one asked what the world was made of, the answer was: isolated, autonomous, imperishable, colorless, odorless, tasteless, self-contained objects that fall into a strict periodic pattern and obey the universal laws of motion. This is what the word "physical" meant through the first three centuries of modern science. This is why physics came to be considered the "hardest" of the hard sciences: it works closest to the fundamental stuff of the universe. Atoms were what proved that materialism was right -- dead right.

That was exactly the issue the Romantics took with the Newtonian philosophers of their day. They believed that an arrogant, aggressive materialism was driving all enchantment from the universe. Atoms were colorless, soulless, unlovely things. They lacked magic. That was why William Blake protested in behalf of the spirit. After all, what were these wretched atoms compared to the glories of true religion?

The atoms of Democritus And Newton's particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore Where Israel's tents do shine so bright

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