Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/226

214 in which we speak of laws of Nature, commenced, but examples of it may be found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza. Bacon employs "law" as the equivalent of "form," and I am inclined to think that he may be responsible for a good deal of the confusion that has subsequently arisen; but I am not aware that the term is used by other authorities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any other sense than that of "rule" or "definite order" of the coexistence of things or succession of events in Nature. Descartes speaks of "règles, que je nomme les lois de la nature." Leibnitz says "loi ou règle générale," as if he considered the terms interchangeable.

The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the "law of gravitation" as put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an observed order. He admits that Kepler's three laws "were an observed order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, "it contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher category of intellectual conceptions than that which is concerned in the mere observation and record of separate and apparently unconnected facts." There is hardly a line in these paragraphs which appears to me to be indisputable. But, to confine myself to the matter in hand, I can not conceive that any one who had taken ordinary pains to acquaint himself with the real nature of either Kepler's or Newton's work could have written them. That the labors of Kepler, of all men in the world, should be called "mere observation and record," is truly wonderful. And any one who will look into the "Principia," or the "Optics," or the "Letters to Bentley," will see, even if he has no more special knowledge of the topics discussed than I have, that Newton over and over again insisted that he had nothing to do with gravitation as a physical cause, and that when he used the terms attraction, force, and the like, he employed them, as he says, "mathematicè" and not "physicè."

How these attractions [of gravity, magnetism, and electricity] may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by impulse or by some other means unknown to me. I use that word here to signify only in a general way any force by which bodies tend toward one another, whatever be the cause.

According to my reading of the best authorities upon the history of science, Newton discovered neither gravitation nor the law of gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his assertion that the notion of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore of "the attractive force of gravitation." What, then, was that labor of unsurpassed magnitude and excellence and immortal influence which Newton did perform?