The wiggle room might be in the definition of 'atomism'. But to be clear, and as said here by Pro. James, Faraday wasn't opposed to the notion of finite points where one can identify certain properties, such as the meeting of force lines. He was opposed to the granting of those points unobserved properties.
Obviously, the meeting of force lines was not a fruitful concept. When physicists imagine "unobserved properties," what are they doing? Are they not creating a model to be tested? For example, J. J. Thomson's plum pudding model, which was falsified in time, was a fruitful model in that it started the ball rolling towards our modern perspective. He seems to have been against attempts to model the atom. I don't know how else to interpret the comment, "why then assume the existence of that of which we are ignorant, which we cannot conceive, and for which there is no philosophical necessity."
This is your assertion, and I have no reason to agree without something to support it. Many such discoveries on atomics initially came out of the mathematics that resulted directly from his work (admittedly something he himself could not indulge in, given his non-mathematical approach; the irony is that it is unlikely that anybody would have gone down that path if not for his experimental focus).
He contributed a great deal, as you say. However, his position on atomism is quite clear and has been well documented by historians. His experimental work with electricity and magnetism and his concept of force fields was groundbreaking, but the resulting contribution to the development of our understanding of the atom seems to be an inadvertent result. Can you demonstrate otherwise?
You seem awfully obsessed by this one fragment of a sentence and I suspect you're reading more into it that than is supported by the greater context. Faraday was against scientists holding undue confidence in atomic properties that hadn't been observed. Electricity was being touted as a fluid, for instance, hence he felt obliged to point out that such assumptions were unwarranted and superfluous (the writing from which that statement was taken was inspired by his friend Ampere's conjectures on the fundamental nature of electricity). Occham's razor, pure and simple. Once observed, as an experientalist he'd have no problem with them at all.
He definitely was a hard-nosed experimentalist and his opposition to fanciful unsupported theories is legendary. However, as I said above, modeling testable theories is one way with which science advances. It certainly appears that he was a bit overly aggressive regarding attempts to model the atom.
In any case, can you point out where such assumptions of atoms being materialistic entities and not points of force necessarily furthered atomic theory post Faraday?
Is it not clear that Thomson's model followed by Rutherford's nuclear model is exactly were such assumptions bore fruit and ultimately lead to our current model?
Look, You and I will never know what was actually in Faraday's mind. His statements seem to be quite clear to me that he was opposed to the atomic theories of his day and he appears to disdain attempts at modeling the atom. Historians of science seem to agree with that interpretation.
This does not detract from his genius and great contributions to physics. Newton and Einstein also got lots of stuff wrong.
