each other by any force going forth out of one to lay hold of another at a distance, and draw it toward itself: the very idea would seem to be absurd, and fit only for the department of theological incomprehensibilities. They gravitate toward each other, undoubtedly, and by virtue of a power acting from within, or from a common centre, outwardly, a pushing, not a pulling power. In fact, all powers in nature would seem to act from within outwards, as Herder observed. Prof. Airy, it is said, has ascertained, by the experiment of weighing a body at the depth of 1260 feet in a coal-pit, that this gravitating tendency of one body toward another (according to the law of inverse proportion to the square of the distance) was greater by the 19000 part, when the centres of gravity of the two bodies were thus brought so much nearer together than they were at the surface: whereas on the pulling theory, it should have been less. Those who still follow the supposed doctrine of Newton, imagine this attracting power to be "always existing around the sun and thence reaching forth through space to lay hold of any body that may come within its reach; and not only around the sun, but around each particle of matter that has existence." 1 As this is a fundamental point in our whole business, let us stop to consider it. Now, if this were true, the attracting power that so goes forth from around all the particles of matter which compose that portion of earth 1260 feet thick, that lies above the body weighed at that depth, and which, on this theory, must draw toward themselves from all directions, would tend to lift up the weighed body, counteracting so far the pulling force of the mass on the other side of it; and it would weigh less than at the surface: whereas by the experiment it actually weighs more. On the other theory, that of a power acting from within outwards in every body and in every particle of matter, and 1 Annual of Sci. Dis., by Wells, 1856. tending to drive or approach them toward each other, at all distances, but still directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, we have a power the effect of which is, necessarily, to keep all the particles of a body compacted together toward the centre of gravity of the body with a force sufficient to maintain the particular form and constitution of the body itself, while increasing in each particle with proximity, and tending to produce greater density toward the centre; but this tendency toward the centre is at the same time restrained, resisted, and limited by that power from within each particle which gives it existence as a particular form of substance; thus producing an equilibrium of stationary balance among all the particles of the body, wherein is the stability and permanence of the body as a whole, and the actual density and form of the body: hence every variety of form. Certain experiments of M. Mosotti on the Epinian theory would seem to prove the existence of a force in bodies, as he says, "repulsive at the smallest distances, a little on, vanishing, afterwards attractive" [or, as he might as well have said, protrusive]" and at all sensible distances attracting [protruding] in proportion to the inverse square of the distance"; as when a comet is driving toward the sun, a repulsive force in the sun, at a certain distance, drives back the ethereal vapor into a long tail or streamer, while nucleus and tail still hold a course together toward the sun. But over and above that exhibition of force which is necessary in order to constitute the given body itself, there must still be exerted from within the whole body, or upon it, outwardly, that certain overplus of force, which is necessary in order to give the body its motion of translation, or change of relative place, and which moves or drives it toward another distant body. This force, as well as the other, may always be inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and may always be taken, mathematically, as a force acting at and from the centre of gravity only: and hence the stability of a body, a sun, a solar system, a stellar system, and an entire universe of systems. In short, there being no such thing as an attracting or pulling power in the stratum of earth above the weighed body, in this experiment, but only a protrusive power and motion in the whole Earth as one body, the body weighed is left free to tend toward the centre of the Earth by the same force and law as at the surface; and the Earth as a whole body has a tendency toward the weighed body, by virtue of that controlling overplus of protrusive force which is to be taken as acting, on the whole, from the centre of gravity of the Earth; and so the body weighs more because the two centres of gravity, the two bodies, are nearer to each other, and by virtue of one and the same original impelling power. This unphilosophical idea of attraction as a pulling power has tended to perpetuate a narrow and perverted use of the inductive method, and almost to bind the eye of science to any true vision, or comprehension, of the Baconian induction, which was to be a rational method for the true interpretation of Nature. The ancients had concluded that nothing could be certainly known; Bacon, that nothing could be certainly known, without the right use of the senses and the intellect; and the disciples of attraction and of the properties of dead substratum have assumed that nothing can be known but by the senses, sensible experience, and instrumental experimentation, without much help from the intellect. The inductive method as used by them is good enough for certain purposes and within limits; but it can never arrive at a philosophy of the universe, until it be used "universally" with Plato and Bacon, and for the actual interpretation of all Nature; for all the particular facts and phenomena together, that are within the possible reach of the senses and experimental observation, can never constitute a universe, but only, at best, a sort of Humboldtian cosmos. By that way alone, the inquirer can never arrive at any conception of the unity of the whole creation; at least, not until his observation should be extended to all the facts of the universe, metaphysical as well as physical, and be made to comprehend intellectual as well as sensible truth, ascending by the scaling ladder of the intellect into the very loftiest parts of nature, and diligently and perseveringly pursuing the thread of the labyrinth. To the man of mere physical science the universe will always be the particular mass of facts, which have been observed by the senses and experiment, together with some sort of hazy and superstitious theology, or what is worse, some kind of materialistic atheism; and for such a man, the idea of a pulling power, or a self-driving power, in each heavenly body, and in every particle of matter, will explain the observed phenomena well enough for all his purposes, and perhaps sufficiently answer the received mathematical formulas. The real mathematician, however, has, in all ages, come nearest to being a philosopher; for his field lies in the world of pure reason, mathematics being, at bottom, a science of the laws of thought and of the dynamics of thinking power. The mere physicist, like Democritus, is apt to stop short with atoms; as if atoms were some self-existent living monads, in a state of universal disintegration, and endowed each with a sort of long feeler and claw, wherewith to reach forth into immensity and seize upon whatever came within its reach, in order to drag it to itself; or as if each particle of matter were an independent self-acting cause, capable of driving itself toward any other particle, of its own mere motion :“ nay,” says Bacon, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus, and Democritus, and Epicurus: for it is a thousand times more credible that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds, unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty without a divine marshal." And when the true philosopher has once found these atoms to be merely secondary forms of substance, deriving their own existence as such as well as all the powers that are active within them from the primary and total substance of all substances and power of all powers, lying underneath, behind, and within, all forms of substance of whatever kind, then is it seen, that all power must proceed, and go forth, from one centre of unity, as a pushing, driving, developing, sustaining, upholding, and creating power; and so, that power is not primarily exerted from as many original and distinct centres as there are bodies, or atoms, in nature, as so many drawing, or as so many driving, ultimate forces; as if all being began and ended with atoms! "Ac si quicquam in Universo esse possit instar insulæ, quod a rerum nexu separetur”! 1 — or, as if some imaginary being, outside the universe, had, in some inconceivable way, created the atoms out of nothing, endowed each with a special power of its own, and then left them to push, or pull, for themselves! Berkeley exposed the absurdity of this sort of science long ago:-"Patet igitur gravitatem aut vim frustra poni pro principio motus." So says the Phaedrus of Plato: "The beginning of motion is that which moves itself; . . . and this is the very essence and true notion of soul"; or, as St. Austin (according to Burton) expounded out of Plato, "a spiritual substance moving itself." 66 § 6. SCIENCE OF SOUL. The motions of the planets and of the sidereal spheres, as far into the depths of immensity as the remotest visible nebula, and down to the slightest irregularity of motion, so far as yet observed and studied, are found to be reducible to a geometric science of the dynamics of power and the 1 De Aug. Scient., L. II. c. 13. 2 De Motu, Works (Dublin, 1784), II. 125. |