Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/311

 forces are wholly different in kind, and there is not the least reason for making one dependent on the other, or denying its possibility without the intervention of the other.

Observation 2.

Except from attraction, no motion can arise on contact, for contact is the reciprocal action of impenetrability, which restrains all motion. Some immediate attraction nrust thus be found apart from contact, in other words, at a distance; for otherwise, even the pressing and impulsive forces, which produce the effort to approach, as they act in an opposite manner to the repulsive force of matter, could have no cause at least originally inherent in the nature of matter. That attraction which takes place without the intervention of repulsive forces may be termed the true attraction, that which proceeds in the other manner the apparent. For properly, the body which another is striving to approach, exercises no attractive force whatever on the latter, because this has been driven towards it from elsewhere by impact. But even these apparent attractions must, at last, have a true one at their basis, because matter made up only of pressure or impact, instead of attraction would not even be matter without attractive forces (proposition 5), and consequently the mode of explaining all phenomena of approach by merely apparent attraction moves in a circle. It is commonly held that Newton did not find it necessary to his system to assume an immediate attraction of matters, but with the strictest abstinence of pure mathematics, left the physicists perfect freedom, in this particular, to explain its possibility as they might find good, without mixing up his propositions with their play of hypotheses. But how could he base the proposition that the "universal attraction of bodies, exercised by them equidistantly on every side is proportioned to the quantity of their matter, if he did not assume that all matter exercised this force of motion simply as matter, and by its essential property? For although, indeed, between two bodies, whether homogeneous or not, as to matter, if one draws the other, the mutual approach (according to the law of the equality of reciprocal action) must always