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It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest. Such a mechanism is in keeping with the manner in which the course of nature is fulfilled, and bears in its very style the impress of invariability of action.
FIXED BELIEFS. The invariability of certain general beliefs They shape the course of a civilisation The difficulty of uprooting them In what respect intolerance is a virtue in a people The philosophic absurdity of a belief cannot interfere with its spreading. 2.
Dates, in the case of such subjects, are no luxury of erudition. The memoir in which Laplace communicated his results on the invariability of the mean motions or mean distances, is dated 1773.
The present invariability of the world of organization is the direct consequence of the physical equilibrium, and so it will continue as long as the mean temperature, the annual supply of light, the composition of the air, the distribution of water, oceanic and atmospheric currents, and other such agencies remain unaltered; but if any one of these, or of a hundred other incidents that might be mentioned, should suffer modification, in an instant the fanciful doctrine of the immutability of species would be brought to its true value.
His steady watch over them showed the invariability of their position with regard to the terminator; and this is as much as to say that the regions of day and night do not shift on the surface of the planet. In other words, she keeps the same face always turned towards the sun. Moreover, since her orbit is nearly circular, libratory effects are very small.
We shall see when we treat of these theories, how we have been led to suppose that inertia depended on velocity and even on direction. If this conception were exact, the principle of the invariability of mass would naturally be destroyed. Considered as a factor of attraction, is mass really indestructible? A few years ago such a question would have seemed singularly audacious.
In the first place, he sees all the species everywhere strictly limited although in the second volume of his work, which appeared after the preceding lines were written, he again warns against a one-sided emphasizing of the invariability of species.
He was not a reading man, and the maxims of books he disregarded or disbelieved; but in the observations he made for himself he trusted: the lessons he drew from life were never lost upon him, and he acted in consequence of that which he believed, with a decision, vigour, and invariability, seldom found even among philosophers.
But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be psychically always the same unalterable, incurable.
The Law of Causation, the recognition of which is the main pillar of inductive science, is but the familiar truth, that invariability of succession is found by observation to obtain between every fact in nature and some other fact which has preceded it; independently of all considerations respecting the ultimate mode of production of phenomena, and of every other question regarding the nature of “Things in themselves.”
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