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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

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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;

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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."

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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.
8 Anat. of Mel. (Boston, 1862), I. 219.

statics of equilibrium, in exact accordance with mathematical laws. The phenomena of electricity, magnetism, light, heat, sound, chemistry, and indeed all physics, art, design, and beauty, admit of numerical expression and a mathematical nomenclature, in accordance with the laws and formulas of mathematical science; for mathematics is nothing else but a science of the laws of thought, divine or human, so far as these laws have ever fallen within the special domain of any mathematician. Nothing is more moral than science; and all science is mathematical. All possible creation must be, and is, mathematical: even miracles are mathematical. That all bodies should be gravitated, weighed, or impelled, toward each other, directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, is evidently necessary to the stability of the universe, in order that there may be a Cosmos, instead of a Chaos, or rather a total oblivion and nonentity of all things, if that were conceivably possible; for, as in the play, —

"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order";

[Tro. and Cr., Act I. Sc. 3.]

as Bacon says of true justice in the law, that it is " suum cuique tribuere, the law guiding all things with line of measure, and proportion":

"Mar. Suum cuique is our Roman justice: This prince in justice seizeth but his own."

Tit. And., Act I. Sc. 2.

Apply any other law, and the planets would

"In evil mixture, to disorder wander.”

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Tro. and Cr., Act I. Sc. 3.

Chaos is a negative term, expressive of the absence of that order which is necessary to produce a cosmos; that is, a partial absence of form and order, not a total negation of all form and substance, in the whole, or in any particular thing; for that would be oblivion or annihilation of that

whole, or of that particular. The popular idea of matter as a sort of dead substratum, possessing of itself certain inherent and essential qualities, properties, and laws of its own, and, as such, being self-subsistent from eternity, as a something distinct from the thinking essence of God, though co-eternal with Him, or as subsisting without God, and thereby moulding itself into a universe, as if it were unnecessary to have any other Creator at all, is a mere illusion of unscientific knowledge and uncritical thinking. Take a solid block of ice, for instance, and (what is equally true in general of a block of basalt, granite, porphyry, or any other solid in nature, though every solid may not admit of all the stages of form), apply heat, and it becomes. liquid water, without any change in the quantity of matter; wherein we see that solidity is not an essential quality of matter, but an accidental quality, that is, merely a certain temporary state of equilibrium of stationary balance in the atoms of the mass, at a given temperature. Raising the temperature, that equilibrium is overcome, by the applied force of heat, and the solid takes on the liquid form. Apply a greater degree of heat, and the liquid water becomes an invisible gaseous vapor: wherein we see again that liquidity is not an essential, but an accidental, quality of matter, being only another state of temporary equilibrium of stationary balance in the atoms of the mass, though having a less degree of fixity and permanence of form than the solid ice, and an equilibrium, as a whole, which is disturbed on application of the slightest degree of external force. Apply a higher degree of heat to this invisible. vapor, and it is resolved into two distinct gases, without any change again in the quantity of matter. There is a great variety of these gases, or gaseous forms of substance, natural or artificial, each having its own peculiar properties and qualities as such, which are doubtless neither less accidental, nor more essential than solidity, liquidity, gaseousness; but are merely so many other forms of tempo

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