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Updated: May 14, 2025
This was the physical theory of light enunciated and defended by Newton; and you will observe that it simply consists in the transference of conceptions, born in the world of the senses, to a subsensible world. But, though the region of physical theory lies thus behind the world of senses, the verifications of theory occur in that world.
It expands, diminishes, moulds, and refines, as the case may be, materials derived from the world of fact and observation. This is more evidently the case in a theory like that of light, where the motions of a subsensible medium, the ether, are presented to the mind. But no theory escapes the condition.
To realise this subsensible world the mind must possess a certain pictorial power. It must be able to form definite images of the things which that world contains; and to say that, if such or such a state of things exist in the subsensible world, then the phenomena of the sensible one must, of necessity, grow out of this state of things.
Here his power of transfer from the sensible to the subsensible would render it easy for him to suppose the light-particles animated, not only with a motion of translation, but also with a motion of rotation. Newton's astronomical knowledge rendered all such conceptions familiar to him. The earth has such a double motion.
The roots of phenomena are embedded in a region beyond the reach of the senses, and less than the root of the matter will never satisfy the scientific mind. We find, accordingly, in this career of optics the greatest minds constantly yearning to break the bounds of the senses, and to trace phenomena to their subsensible foundation.
This is the storehouse from which its materials are derived; and the magic of its art consists, not in creating things anew, but in so changing the magnitude, position, grouping, and other relations of sensible things, as to render them fit for the requirements of the intellect in the subsensible world. Descartes imagined space to be filled with something that transmitted light instantaneously.
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