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That is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand: they relate to events of distant interest, though important; but everything remarkable that is furnished me by the period I must express musically." In short, the events go into the composer's brain, mix there, and come out changed into a musical structure. The plastic imagination furnishes us a counter-proof: it transposes inversely.

But as the bodies of the solar system are nearly spherical, they will all act upon one another and upon bodies placed on their surface, as if they were so many centres of attraction; and therefore we obtain the law of gravity, that one sphere will act upon another sphere with a force directly proportional to the quantity of matter, and inversely as the square of the distance between the centres of the spheres.

The value of silver, therefore, in those ancient times, must have been to its value in the present, as three to four inversely; that is, three ounces of silver would then have purchased the same quantity of labour and commodities which four ounces will do at present.

The attraction of all matter for all other matter is in proportion directly to the mass and inversely to the square of the distance.

As each is, we shall say, four pounds in weight, the square of each would be 16. This does not mean that there would be sixteen times the attraction, but, as the law says, inversely as the square of the distance, so that at two inches there is only one-sixteenth the attraction as at one inch.

"Self-motion, called life, and inorganic movement of bodies by agencies outside of themselves, are but quantitatively, intensively, or gradually different forms of motion; not in their innermost being different.... Our will changes many kinds of motion into heat, makes cold metal to be red-hot simply by hammering.... Likewise inversely, as the law of the conservation of force must require, a part of the eternal heat of the metal can be now and forever transposed into the living motion of our soul."

Less than a hundred miles from the city of Gotham, across broad green fields, dotted into squares and oblong valleys by full-leafed maple, and elm, and mulberry, was the village of Brookfield. A hundred years of expansion in the surrounding land had acted inversely with the little hamlet, and had pinched it into a hermitical isolation.

Perhaps, though Hocbridge watched and whispered, its animus would have been little more than a trifle to persons in thriving circumstances. But unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and before the skin has had time to thicken, makes people susceptible inversely to their opportunities for shielding themselves.

But the great mind that defined gravity's law was a religious mind too profound to see anything final in its own feeble power. Newton was no atheist. None better than he knew the mysterious character of his law. That it has worked from all eternity "directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance" he knew and told his fellow-creatures.

Yet in the mere question, putting any answer outside possibility, there is a wonderful suggestiveness, if it has happened to come to you illuminated by experience. It becomes a little clearer, perhaps, if we substitute devils for angels. A friend of mine used always to look at it thus inversely when he quarrelled with his wife. Forgive so many enigmas to start with, but it was this way.