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If it had not been previously known that the planets were hindered from moving in straight lines by some force tending toward the interior of their orbit, though the exact direction was doubtful; or if it had not been known that the force increased in some proportion or other as the distance diminished, and diminished as it increased, Newton’s argument would not have proved his conclusion.
One of Newton’s great laws of motion is, that a body must continue forever in a state of rest, inertia being a property of matter, or being put in motion continues forever in a straight line, if it be not disturbed by the action of an external cause. Now let us apply this law to our planet, as a body, and see the result. What is the first necessary conclusion to which we are driven? Ans.
Hence chemistry, though similar extensions and simplifications of its generalizations are continually taking place, is still in the main an experimental science; and is likely so to continue, unless some comprehensive induction should be hereafter arrived at, which, like Newton’s, shall connect a vast number of the smaller known inductions together, and change the whole method of the science at once.
An inquiry which of the bodies of the solar system causes by its attraction some particular irregularity in the orbit or periodic time of some satellite or comet, would be a case of the second description. Newton’s was a case of the first.
In his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences he continually asserts, that propositions which not only are not self-evident, but which we know to have been discovered gradually, and by great efforts of genius and patience, have, when once established, appeared so self-evident that, but for historical proof, it would have been impossible to conceive that they had not been recognised from the first by all persons in a sound state of their faculties. “We now despise those who, in the Copernican controversy, could not conceive the apparent motion of the sun on the heliocentric hypothesis; or those who, in opposition to Galileo, thought that a uniform force might be that which generated a velocity proportional to the space; or those who held there was something absurd in Newton’s doctrine of the different refrangibility of differently coloured rays; or those who imagined that when elements combine, their sensible qualities must be manifest in the compound; or those who were reluctant to give up the distinction of vegetables into herbs, shrubs, and trees.
The “inestimable value,” the “incomparable significance,” the “immeasurable importance” of the Theory of Descent lies, according to Haeckel, in the fact that by means of it we can explain the origin of the forms of life “in a mechanical manner.” The theory, especially in regard to the descent of man from the apes, is to him not a working hypothesis or tentative mode of representation; it is a result comparable to Newton’s law of gravitation or the Kant-Laplace cosmogony.
If the theories of heat, cohesion, crystallization, and chemical action, are destined, as there can be little doubt that they are, to become deductive, the truths which will then be regarded as the principia of those sciences would probably, if now announced, appear quite as novel as the law of gravitation appeared to the cotemporaries of Newton; possibly even more so, since Newton’s law, after all, was but an extension of the law of weight—that is, of a generalization familiar from of old, and which already comprehended a not inconsiderable body of natural phenomena.
Whewell’s authority to have accorded as accurately with the Cartesian hypothesis, in its finally improved state, as with Newton’s. But it is not, I conceive, a valid reason for accepting any given hypothesis, that we are unable to imagine any other which will account for the facts.
In his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences he continually asserts, that propositions which not only are not self-evident, but which we know to have been discovered gradually, and by great efforts of genius and patience, have, when once established, appeared so self-evident that, but for historical proof, it would have been impossible to conceive that they had not been recognized from the first by all persons in a sound state of their faculties. “We now despise those who, in the Copernican controversy, could not conceive the apparent motion of the sun on the heliocentric hypothesis; or those who, in opposition to Galileo, thought that a uniform force might be that which generated a velocity proportional to the space; or those who held there was something absurd in Newton’s doctrine of the different refrangibility of differently colored rays; or those who imagined that when elements combine, their sensible qualities must be manifest in the compound; or those who were reluctant to give up the distinction of vegetables into herbs, shrubs, and trees.
Thus, in the parallel case of science, it is commonly said on the continent, that the very marvellousness of Newton’s powers was the bane of English mathematics: inasmuch as those who succeeded him were content with his discoveries, bigoted to his methods of investigation, and averse to those new instruments which have carried on the French to such brilliant and successful results.
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