THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 1? i 



This passage, severely criticised, if I remember rightly, when the 

 address was originally published, it would be scarcely fair to quote, 

 were ib not that Canon Kingsley has repeated it at a later date in his 

 work, " The Roman and the Teuton." The very unusual renderings 

 of scientific ideas which it contains need here be only enumerated. 

 Mr. Kingsley differs profoundly from philosophers and men of science, 

 in regarding a law as itself a power or force, and so in thinking of one 

 law as " conquered by other laws ; " whereas the accepted conception 

 of law is that of an established order, to which the manifestations of a 

 power or force conform. He enunciates, too, a quite exceptional view 

 of gravitation. As conceived by astronomers and physicists, gravita- 

 tion is a universal and ever-acting force, which portions of matter ex- 

 ercise on one another when at sensible distances ; and the law of this 

 force is that it varies inversely as the square of the distance. Mr. 

 Kingsley's view, however, appears to be that the law of gravitation is 

 " defeated " if a stone is prevented from falling to the ground that 

 the law " struggles" (not the force), and that because it no longer pro- 

 duces motion, the " inevitable action of the laws of gravity " (not of 

 gravity) is suspended: the truth being that neither the force nor its 

 law is in the slightest degree modified. Further, the theory of nat- 

 ural processes which Mr. Kingsley has arrived at seems to be, that 

 when two or more forces (or laws, if he prefers it) come into play, 

 there is a partial or complete suspension of one by another. Whereas, 

 the doctrine held by men of science is, that the forces are all in full 

 operation, and the effect is their resultant ; so that, for example, when a 

 shot is fired horizontally from a cannon, the force impressed on it pro- 

 duces in a given time just the same amount of horizontal motion as 

 though gravity were absent, while gravity produces in that same time 

 a fall just equal to that which it would have produced had the shot 

 been dropped from the mouth of the cannon. Of course, holding these 

 peculiar views of causation as displayed among simple physical phe- 

 nomena, Canon Kingsley is consistent in denying historical sequence ; 

 and in saying that, " as long as man has the mysterious power of break- 

 ing the laws of his own being, such a sequence not only cannot be dis- 

 covered, but it cannot exist." l At the same time it is manifest that, 

 until he comes to some agreement with men of science respecting con- 

 ceptions of forces, of their laws, and of the modes in which phenomena 

 produced by compositions of forces are interpretable in terms of com- 

 pound laws, no discussion of the question at issue can be carried on 

 with profit. 



Without waiting for such an agreement, however, which is proba- 

 bly somewhat remote, Canon Kingsley's argument may be met by 

 putting side by side with it some of his own conclusions set forth else- 

 where. In an edition of "Alton Locke" published since the delivery 

 of the address above quoted from, there is a new preface, containing, 

 among others, the following passages : 



1 Page 22, 



