Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/373

Rh recent times, all mankind were in this state of incapacity with respect to physical axioms; and the mass of mankind are so still. Various popular notions betray inability to form clear ideas of forces and their relations, or carelessness in thinking, or both. Effects are expected without causes of fit kinds; or effects extremely disproportionate to causes are looked for; or causes are supposed to end without effects. But though many are thus incapable of grasping physical axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable a priori by a developed intelligence, than it follows that there is no necessity in logical relations because many have intellects not developed enough to perceive the necessity.

"The ultimate physical truth of which clear apprehension is eventually reached is, that force can neither arise without an equivalent antecedent, nor disappear without an equivalent consequent. Along with power of introspection there comes recognition of the fact that existence cannot be conceived as beginning or ending: the Laws of Thought themselves negative any such mental representation. And if it be asked why this intuition, which all physical axioms indirectly imply, and which is postulate in every physical experiment, is to be taken as authoritative because its negation is inconceivable, the answer is that no argument which sets out to discredit it can do this without logical suicide; since there is no other warrant for asserting the dependence of any conclusion on its premises than the inconceivability of its negation."

This passage forms part of a revised version of the chapters on Matter, Motion, and Force, which I have contemplated making for this year past. When those chapters were written and stereotyped, in April, 1861 (see Preface), the modern doctrines concerning Force and its transformation were so imperfectly developed, that some of the leading technical words now currently used were not introduced. The reorganization of "First Principles," which I made in 1867, for the purpose of more truly presenting the general Theory of Evolution, did not implicate these chapters, and I believe I did not even re-read them: the stereotype plates, in common with those of many other chapters, with the numberings of pages and sections altered, were used afresh, and continue still to stand as they originally did. But while now rectifying defects of statement which it was scarcely possible to avoid thirteen years ago, I find no reason for changing the essential conception set forth in those chapters; nor is the need for changing it suggested to me by those on whose judgments I have the best reasons for relying.