"Force" is a contribution of our mental consciousness to the world of phenomena; and apart from this consciousness, no changes in the external world merely could ever give us it. The external world presents things only in coexistence or in series. The series or successions of its phenomena suggest the idea of Force. The idea becomes inseparably blended with the mutations of nature which we see proceeding around us; but it does not come out of any of these mutations. We could never catch it by any of our external senses, All we see or feel is merely change following change, first one condition then another. The idea is born within ; it comes of our self-consciousness: it is the product of our personal life and experience. If we had been entirely passive, no variety of external changes could have induced it in us; and conversely constituted as we are, the subjects of volition, conscious. ourselves of being powers, it does not require any special set of phenomena to call forth the idea within us. We carry it with us and supply it to nature. It cleaves inseparably to all its in the changes themselves, but because we cannot conceive of them otherwise than under this category. "Take away the consciousness of Force in ourselves, and with the keenest vision we should see it nowhere in nature. Endow us with it, and we have still no more ability than before to perceive it as an object in the external world-observation giving us access only to phenomena as distributed in space and time."1 Why, then, do we apply the causal idea everywhere to nature, and infer Force as a reality everywhere around us, “inseparable from matter" and "the source 1 Martineau's Essays, p. 140. changes, not as residing 1 A of its various changes"? Simply because we cannot help viewing nature in the light of our reason. rational necessity compels us to see in nature the same explanation of movement that we recognise in ourselves. And so we transfer the idea of Force-born within us, the product of our inner consciousness, the reflection of ourselves-to the world of phenomena, and apprehend their evolutions as the expression of power. If this is an illegitimate transfer, all we have to say is, that its illegitimacy must be acknowledged throughout. If we have no right to transfer our own modes of working to nature, we have no right to use ideas and language which only come out of this transference, which have no meaning, and could not possibly exist on a mere outward or phenomenal basis. If we are to be confined to this basis, we must work it with its own machinery of thought. We must not stealthily borrow from a higher source ideas of "Cause" and of "Law," which no mere observation of phenomena could have ever given us. In other words, if we are to cast away Metaphysic, we must not keep its old clothes. The truth is, that we can never be quit of Metaphysic for the sake of science itself. Science not only roots itself in metaphysical ideas such as those of "law" and "force"; it must not only go to Metaphysic for its capital of thought wherewith to work in its own province, but it tends moreover in all its higher aspects to pass off into purely metaphysical or transcendental conceptions. The farther modern science carries us, the more do we lose hold of matter and mere physical results, and pass into the realm of im1 Grove, p. 16. material and invisible realities. "The old speculations of philosophy, which cut the ground from materialism. by showing how little we know of matter, are now being daily reinforced by the subtle analysis of the physiologist, the chemist, and the electrician. Under that analysis matter dissolves and disappears, remaining only as a form of Force." The realities of nature unclothe themselves in the last analysis. We can number and measure, but we can no longer see and handle them. We have passed into the region of the Invisible. So far from phenomena, therefore, being all with which science has to do, phenomena are, so to speak, merely the middle term of science. Both at the beginning and the end it stretches beyond the phenomenal sphere, having alike its roots and its summit hidden in the psychical or metaphysical sphere. Mr Lewes himself admits, in his recent work on Aristotle, that "the fundamental ideas of modern science are as transcendental as any of the axioms in the Ancient Philosophy." " 2 But if we cannot get rid of Metaphysic, can we get any more rid of Theology? We have seen how impossible it is to get on in science without the conceptions of Law and Force. The scientific intellect presupposes and works with them in every direction; but after we have made the most of such conceptions, and carried them up to their highest form of generalisation, do we not still keep asking a deeper meaning of things than they can yield? The law of gravitation, for example, which at once brings before us the highest idea of scientific law which we can form, and the 1 The Reign of Law, by the Duke of Argyll, p. 117. highest and most general expression of Force which we know to operate in nature-what is this law when we examine it? It is the name by which we denote certain unvarying proportions of action betwixt the celestial masses, betwixt all particles of matter. These are "directly as the mass, and inversely as the square of the distance." Such is the formula of gravitation, the loftiest, the most universal under which we have been able to bring natural phenomena. But to be able to measure this universal relation of phenomena, or the force which binds them together, is by no means to explain them. May we not say of such an explanation, in Comtean phrase, that it is merely a "reproduction in numerical terms of the statement of the phenomena"? We keep asking what is the force of gravity? how is its exact measure sustained? by what means was the original balance established betwixt it and the centrifugal forces by which the planets move in their orbits? Each force, if left to itself, would be destructive of the universe. Were it not for the force of gravitation, the centrifugal force which impels the planets would fling them into space. Were it not for these centrifugal forces, the force of gravitation would dash them. against the sun. The orbits, therefore, of the planets, with all that depends upon them, are determined by the nice and perfect balance which is maintained by these two forces; and the ultimate fact of astronomical science is not the law of gravitation, but the adjustment between this law and others which are less known, so as to produce and maintain the existing solar system." 1 1 Reign of Law, p. 92. E Neither Law nor Force, in any simple form, is adequate to explain any class of phenomena, illuminating as it is to the mind to be able to gather up its knowledge in such ultimate ratios as the law of gravitation. We still keep asking what is the Force? Why is the Law? We must get beneath even such ultimate conceptions as these, and lay hold of the living Power or Mind of which they are merely the attributes or expression. It is only by adding on Mind to Nature, that we can reach these conceptions; and so it is only by carrying them out into their full meaning that we find any real explanation in them as applied to nature. When we penetrate behind Law to the Reason which speaks in it—when we recognise in Force the Will whose attribute it is-then, and not till then, do we approach a solution of the phenomena in which we can rest and find satisfaction. And therefore, as formerly we emerged upon the metaphysical sphere in the mere attempt to vindicate the language of science, so now we emerge upon the theological in the attempt to read the full meaning of this language as applied to nature. Law and Force are nothing in nature if they do not bespeak an Intelligent Power governing and sustaining it. They explain nothing except in so far as they denote such a Power. This is true, taking Law and Force in their most simple forms, and supposing that what nature brought before us in the last resource was a unity of either. But such is not the fact, as the Duke of Argyll has admirably shown in his volume on the 'Reign of Law,' from which we have already quoted. What nature gives us in the last resource everywhere is not unity of either Law or Force, but multiplicities of both. Law |