Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/325

Rh has filled up again. Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum has been resuscitated, though for other reasons than those which satisfied the Aristotelians. It is the mathematicians and not the metaphysicians who are now discussing the relative merits of the plenum and the vacuum. Newton, in his third letter to Bentley, wrote in this wise: "That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it." Roger Cotes, who was Newton's successor in the chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, was only four years old when the first edition of the "Principia" was issued, and Newton outlived him by ten years. The venerable teacher pronounced upon the young mathematician, his pupil, these few but comprehensive words of eulogy: "If Cotes had lived, we should have known something." The view taken of gravitation by Cotes was not the same as that held by his master. He advocated the proposition that action at a distance must be accepted as one of the primary qualities of matter, admitting of no further analysis. It was objected by Hobbes and other metaphysicians, that it t was inconceivable that a body should act where it was not. All our knowledge of mechanical forces is derived from the conscious effort we ourselves make in producing motion. As this motion employs the machinery of contact, the force of gravitation is wholly outside of all our experience. The advocates of action at a distance reply that there is no real contact in any case, that the difficulty is the same with the distance of molecules as that of planets, that the mathematics are neither long-sighted nor short-sighted, and that an explanation which suits other forces is good enough for gravitation.

Comte extricated himself from this embarrassment by excluding causes altogether from his positive philosophy. He rejects the word attraction as implying a false analogy, inconsistent with Newton's law of distance. He substitutes the word gravitation, but only as a blind expression by which the facts are generalized. According to Comte's philosophy, the laws of Newton are on an equality with the laws of Kepler, only they are more comprehensive, and the glory of Kepler has the same stamp as that of Newton. Hegel, the eminent German metaphysician, must have looked at the subject in the same light when he wrote these words: "Kepler discovered the laws of free motion; a discovery of immortal glory. It has since been the fashion to say that Newton first found out the truth of these rules. It has seldom happened that the honor of the first discoverer has been more unjustly transferred to another." Schelling goes further in the same direction: he degrades the Newtonian law of attraction into an empirical fact, and exalts the laws of Kepler into necessary results of our ideas.