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Updated: May 10, 2025
Such was the verdict pronounced some thirty years ago by James Clerk-Maxwell, one of the very greatest of nineteenth-century physicists, regarding the existence of an all-pervading plenum in the universe, in which every particle of tangible matter is immersed. And this verdict may be said to express the attitude of the entire philosophical world of our day.
But it is more usual to employ what is called the plenum process, in which air under high pressure is pumped into the caisson and expels the water, as in a diving bell. Workmen then descend, entering through an air lock, and excavate the ground at the bottom of the caisson, which sinks gradually as the excavation continues.
"I am still of my first opinion," answered Pangloss, "for I am a philosopher and I cannot retract, especially as Leibnitz could never be wrong; and besides, the pre-established harmony is the finest thing in the world, and so is his plenum and materia subtilis."
Nature is a plenum, is finished, and the Divine account with her is closed; but man is only yet a chick in the egg. With him it is still the first day of creation, and he has not received the benediction of a completed work. And yet the completion is involved and promised in our daily experience. Man is a perpetual seeker.
Now though we allow the world to be at present a plenum, we may easily conceive it to be deprived of motion; and this idea will certainly be allowed possible. It must also be allowed possible, to conceive the annihilation of any part of matter by the omnipotence of the deity, while the other parts remain at rest.
If you will not give it that name, motion is possible in a plenum, without any impulse in infinitum, without returning in a circle, and without penetration. But however we may express ourselves, we must always confess, that we have no idea of any real extension without filling it with sensible objects, and conceiving its parts as visible or tangible.
I have already discussed the question as to the actual moment, in which the change of the grandiflorum variety into the new plenum form must be assumed to have taken place. In this respect some stress is to be laid on the fact that the improvement through selection has been gradual and continuous, though very rapid from the first moment.
If now and then some dreamer conceived the great bodies of the firmament as floating in a less material plenum and such iconoclastic dreamers there are in all ages no record of his musings has come down to us, and we must freely admit that if such thoughts existed they were alien to the character of the Egyptian mind as a whole.
In constitutional questions relating to regulations of the confederation the plenum was to be allowed, that is, the six states of the highest rank were to have each four votes, the next five states each three, Brunswick, Schwerin, and Nassau, each two, and all the remaining princes without distinction, each one vote. Austria held the permanent presidency.
There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum at rest.
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