Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/428

412 being unintelligent, it can have no causative power, and can produce no change, for all changes in matter must be, by its motion, massive or atomic, and matter cannot move itself.

Even if it could be imbued with motive power, it could have no inducement, no tendency, to move in one direction rather than another; and a tendency which is equal in all directions is no tendency in any direction. If all matter were at this moment quiescent, even the materialists will not assert that it could of itself begin to move.

It may, however, be urged that both the arguments thus drawn from the difficulty of conceiving the creation of matter, and the necessity of motion to its causal power, may be met by the hypothesis that matter was not created, but has existed through a past eternity, and that its original condition was that of motion, and that there is no more difficulty in conceiving this than in conceiving that intelligence, with its activities, has had no beginning.

But, granting that matter has always existed, and originally had motion, and consequent power, still, if the tendency is to expend and exhaust this power in producing effects, by collision or otherwise, or, admitting the conservation of force, if its tendency is to become merely potential, then the force which it originally had, in virtue of being in motion, must, in the infinite period of its existence, have been either wholly exhausted or reduced to an infinitesimal, requiring the intervention of some active power to again give it any practical force.

But whether matter, supposing it to exist, can of itself, by means of its motion, be an independent power or force, still depends on another question, viz., Is the tendency of a body in motion, when the power which put it in motion is withdrawn, to continue to move, or to stop? In other words, is the application of extrinsic power required to keep it in motion, or is such application required to stop it? Having no power to move itself when once at rest, it could have no power to act, but could only be acted upon, and, if it has inertia, it would be a means of exhausting other force.

If when once in motion its tendency is to continue in motion, then it could be used as an instrument by which intelligent power, putting it in motion, could extend the effects of its own action in time and space.

If the tendency is to stop, then it could have no power or force, in virtue of being in motion, and could not even be a means of extending the effects of the action of other powers.

I have heretofore confessed my inability to solve this question as to the tendency of a moving body to continue its motion, or to stop when the motive power is withdrawn. I have not, perhaps, been able even to disentangle it from the empirical meshes in which it has become involved, and which, in my view, do not and cannot furnish any clew to its solution; but, until this point is settled, I do not see how matter, though in motion, can properly be regarded as a force, or even as a conserver of force imparted to it by some other power.