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Updated: May 6, 2025
The practical divisibility of matter disclosed by modern physics may well arrest and astonish us. But biology, the science which investigates the phenomena of all living things, is in this matter no whit behind.
Though on both sides, both in addition and division, either of space or duration, when the idea under consideration becomes very big or very small, its precise bulk becomes very obscure and confused; and it is the NUMBER of its repeated additions or divisions that alone remains clear and distinct; as will easily appear to any one who will let his thoughts loose in the vast expansion of space, or divisibility of matter.
Between the true and the false there is a third possibility, the Unmeaning: and this alternative is fatal to Sir William Hamilton’s extension of the maxim to Noumena. That Matter must either have a minimum of divisibility or be infinitely divisible, is more than we can ever know.
For I would fain have instanced anything in our notion of spirit more perplexed, or nearer a contradiction, than the very notion of body includes in it; the divisibility IN INFINITUM of any finite extension involving us, whether we grant or deny it, in consequences impossible to be explicated or made in our apprehensions consistent; consequences that carry greater difficulty, and more apparent absurdity, than anything can follow from the notion of an immaterial knowing substance.
If every elementary atom is a sensitive being, how shall I conceive of that intimate communication by which one feels within the other, so that their two egos are blended in one? Attraction may be a law of nature whose mystery is unknown to us; but at least we conceive that there is nothing in attraction acting in proportion to mass which is contrary to extension and divisibility.
But as against these apparent facts infinite extent and infinite divisibility philosophers have advanced arguments tending to show that there could be no infinite collections of things, and that therefore the number of points in space, or of instants in time, must be finite.
No restriction was imposed by law on the free divisibility of property.
Beyond this there was the further question of the divisibility of the kingdom. So fully was southern Scotland feudalised that it seemed arguable that the monarchy, or at least its demesne lands, might be divided among all the representatives of the coheiresses, after the fashion in which the Huntingdon estates had been allotted to all the representatives of Earl David.
And as this absurdity is very glaring in itself, so there is no argument founded on it which is not attended with a new absurdity, and involves not an evident contradiction. I might give as instances those arguments for infinite divisibility, which are derived from the point of contact.
The fact of the vast diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility of matter, and the nicety of the senses.
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