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It does not seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power of association, the strength of passion, the vis inertiae of sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a spectacle those influences which make up that power of the world which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.
We move our legs, and continue in a peripatetic state; for the man who has gone out of his house with a purpose to walk, exercises the power of volition when he sets out, but proceeds in his motion by a semi-voluntary act, by a sort of vis inertiae, which will not cease to operate without an express reason for doing so, and advances a thousand steps without distinctly willing any but the first.
Sheets of spray sometimes burst over the side and drenched them, but they cared nothing for that, being pretty well protected by oilskins, sou'-westers, and sea-boots. Straining and striving, sometimes gaining an inch or two, sometimes a yard or so, while the smack plunged and kicked, the contest seemed like a doubtful one between vis inertiae and the human will.
Centre of civilization, as they call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo.
She had little comfort in the society of her aunt. Indeed, she felt strongly tempted to return again to England the same month, and seek a divine service elsewhere. But it was not at all so easy then as it is now for a woman to find the opportunity of being helpful in the world of suffering. Mrs. Forsyth was one of those women who get their own way by the very vis inertiae of their silliness.
They are, to a great extent, the slaves of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the necessary exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a better. Interest itself is powerless before their indolence, prejudice, habits, and usages.
"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics.
They forgot that every social improvement, and most mechanical ones, have had to make their way against laziness, ignorance, envy, vested wrongs, vested superstitions, and the whole vis inertiae of the world, the flesh, and the devil. They were guilty indeed, in this case, not merely of ignorance of human nature, but of forgetfulness of fact.
The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour "Subit quippe etiam ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
Once again, the closing months of the year witnessed a papal election; and for the second time Wolsey was disappointed. The reign of Adrian closed in September. It had been brief, well intentioned, and honest: but ineffective. The Pope's efforts at reform had been met by the solid vis inertiae of the ecclesiastical world.
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