HOW PHENOMENA ARE INTERPRETED. 67 



which was imagined to be in accordance with moral quality. 

 The Almighty had made things perfect ; a circle was the only 

 perfect circuit. Kepler discovered that none of the bodies 

 involved moved in circles but in ellipses, and this is known as 

 one of Kepler's laws. But Kepler, unable to imagine how 

 such bodies could move in such ellipses as he observed they 

 did, and, like others, feeling obliged to give some sort of an 

 explanation for the apparent anomaly, invented guiding spirits 

 whose office was to thus move the heavenly bodies. Then 

 came Sir Isaac Newton, who showed that, with gravitation 

 assumed, all the observed motions were accounted for, and 

 further, that the so-called perfect circle orbit was the only 

 unstable orbit. 



In this series of steps towards the explanation of observed 

 phenomena, the first was wrong in every particular. The 

 others were wrong, and wholly wrong, to just the extent they 

 departed from simple mechanical relations and incorporated 

 unmechanical and unrelated notions with their explanations. 

 Again, it has been thought a reasonable explanation of the 

 relations and motions of the bodies which make up the Solar 

 system that they were thus created, each one at its proper dis- 

 tance from the sun, and with rotations and revolutions properly 

 adjusted for stability. The Solar system started thus. No 

 reason or explanation was needed save that it was the will of 

 an omnipotent creator which, as already pointed out, is not an 

 explanation but a reference to the unexplainable. Kant per- 

 ceived that the involved relations were probably of a mathe- 

 matical sort, and inferred there was probably some simple 

 mechanical explanation of the whole arrangement. Laplace 

 attacked the problem and showed if the material which now 

 makes up the Solar system had been scattered in space in a 

 gaseous form, gravitation would bring it to just such a system 

 of globes, with masses, distances, rates of rotation and satellites 

 as we find them to have. The telescopes at that time showed 

 many patches of nebulous masses in the sky ; but as the tele- 

 scope was improved many of these patches were seen to be 

 dense clusters of stars, and the inference was fairly allowable 

 that with sufficient telescopic power all might in a similar wav 



