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Updated: May 7, 2025
To include physical force, chemical force, molecular force, and vital force all under one and the same category, and then interpret their several modes of action on any theory of force-correlation, is not emancipating language from the gross thraldom into which their "molecular machinery" has driven it.
Those who have the reputation of being the profoundest thinkers and delvers in the newly-discovered realm of Force-correlation in Europe, and who have more or less modestly contributed to that reputation themselves, have evidently thought to eclipse, if not to entirely throw into the shade, the great exploit of Leverrier, in pointing out the exact place in their empirical heavens where the superior optics of some future observer shall behold, in all its glory, this "undiscovered correlative of force," which they have indicated as lying within the higher possibilities and potentialities of matter.
And a theory that is impossible of realization is of no practical utility in itself, and of little value as the basis of further theory. If, then, the theory of force equivalence is a failure in practical application, it furnishes a very poor basis on which to predicate force-correlation, or the doctrine of reciprocal forces.
Nature would so utterly abhor the practice as resolutely to slam the door in Mr. Spencer's face, if the obstinacy of the mule did not kick it off its hinges. And nature would be quite as intractable in the case of "force-correlation," another of Mr. Spencer's redoubtable phrases. This term is quite recent in its application to animate objects, nor has it been long applied to inanimate.
"The soul of music never dies, Nor slumbers in its shell; 'Tis sphere-descended from the skies, And thence returns to dwell." Force-Correlation, Differentiation and Other Life Theories. Among the more startling, if not decidedly brilliant, vital theories which have been advanced within the last few years, is that which makes life an "undiscovered correlative of force."
But after devoting so much time to "force-correlation," and "force-differentiation," the advocates of "molecular-machinery" may feel themselves neglected if we dismiss their favorite hobby without further notice. The precise parentage of this term is disputed, but it has any number of putative fathers.
All these different expressions of force are to be tethered together definitionally bound hand and foot under the one explanatory head of "force-correlation." We protest against the labor of thus unifying all the natural forces of the universe, even if it were practicable under scientific methods.
And how any two forms should happen to be sexually paired, on the same or different lines of divergence, is one of those inexplicable mysteries which must puzzle Herbert Spencer in all his labyrinthian searches into "Force-correlation," "Differentiation," "the Dynamic Force of Molecules," etc., etc. However successful he may be in other directions, he will inevitably fail in this.
Force, in its mechanical sense, is that power which produces motion, or an alteration in the direction of motion, and is incapable of being specialized, except in a highly figurative sense, into a thousand and one correlates of motion. But these miscellaneous and figurative forces are not what we are considering. The doctrine of force-correlation takes no such wide and comprehensive sweep.
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