Page:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 2.djvu/469

Rh other at a distance to take place, not instantaneously, but after a time proportional to the distance between the elements. In this way he obtains expressions for the action of one electric circuit on another, which coincide with those which are known to be true. Clausius, however, has, in this case also, criticized some parts of the mathematical calculations into which we shall not here enter.

865.] There appears to be, in the minds of these eminent men, some prejudice, or à priori objection, against the hypothesis of a medium in which the phenomena of radiation of light and heat, and the electric actions at a distance take place. It is true that at one time those who speculated as to the causes of physical phenomena, were in the habit of accounting for each kind of action at a distance by means of a special æthereal fluid, whose function and property it was to produce these actions. They filled all space three and four times over with æthers of different kinds, the properties of which were invented merely to  'save appearances' , so that more rational enquirers were willing rather to accept not only Newton's definite law of attraction at a distance, but even the dogma of Cotes, that action at a distance is one of the primary properties of matter, and that no explanation can be more intelligible than this fact. Hence the undulatory theory of light has met with much opposition, directed not against its failure to explain the phenomena, but against its assumption of the existence of a medium in which light is propagated.

A MEDIUM NECESSARY.

866.] We have seen that the mathematical expressions for electrodynamic action led, in the mind of Gauss, to the conviction that a theory of the propagation of electric action in time would be found to be the very key-stone of electrodynamics. Now we are unable to conceive of propagation in time, except either as the flight of a material substance through space, or as the propagation of a condition of motion or stress in a medium already existing in space. In the theory of Neumann, the mathematical conception called Potential, which we are unable to conceive as a material substance, is supposed to be projected from one particle to another, in a manner which is quite independent of a medium, and which, as Neumann has himself pointed out, is extremely different from that of the propagation of light. In the theories of Riemann and Betti it would appear that the action is supposed to be propagated in a manner somewhat more similar to that of light.

But in all of these theories the question naturally occurs:―If