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The force of gravitation, even admitting that to be, as it were, a condition of the creation of matter, would have made those bodies revolve in ellipses of any degree of eccentricity just as well, provided the angle and the force of projection had been varied. Then, why was this form rather, than any other chosen? No one knew; yet no one doubted that there was ample reason for it.
Gravitation never decks itself in rainbows, nor does it vaunt its undoubted strength in thunder. It is content to make little show, because it is very strong; yet you have always to reckon with it. It is undemonstrative, but it is always there. The love of Esther and Henry was like that. It has made little show in this history, but few readers can have missed its presence in the atmosphere.
The Cartesians long rejected the Newtonian doctrine of the gravitation of all bodies towards one another, on the faith of a general proposition, the reverse of which seemed to them to be inconceivable—the proposition that a body cannot act where it is not.
'The time has already been long, said the Chancellor softly. 'For an excellent reason: because we have not always been as now, a huge bulk. The bulk of the new Empire must by force of gravitation attract all the smaller bodies round to itself. It is by a miracle only that Maäsau has stood alone so long. 'And by another miracle she might go on standing alone a little longer.
Newton, dozing under an apple-tree, is hit on the head by a falling apple, and there follows the law of gravitation. Franklin flies a kite, and a shock of electricity starts him upon the road to his discoveries. Archimedes in his bath notices that his body seems to grow lighter, and there follows the great law which bears his name.
I never look at one of them without feeling that gravitation of soul toward its artist which poetry always excites. Often the artist is unknown; here we know him; Erwin von Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest, in architecture. We visited his house a house old and quaint, and to me full of suggestions and emotions.
The conception has the further merit of correlating gravitation with electricity, magnetism, and light, as a condition of that strange ethereal ocean of which modern physics takes so much account. But here, again, clearly, we are but heaping hypothesis upon hypothesis, as before.
But the loyal Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they are there. Their operation has become to him like daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England is so complete as to be invisible.
The mathematical solution of the problem was simple enough. It is based on a comparison of the moon's distance with the length of the earth's radius. On making this calculation, Newton found that the pull of gravitation if that were really the force that controls the moon gives that body a fall of slightly over fifteen feet in the first minute, instead of thirteen feet.
But he felt no similar difficulty as to physical causes; and throughout his speculations, as in the passage I have already cited respecting gravitation, he distinctly refuses to consider as part of the order of nature any fact which is not explicable from the nature of its physical cause.
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