150 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



I have been thus particular in these definitions of the necessary elements 

 of all possible physical science, because without some clearness of thought 

 in our first starting points, in all science alike, confusion must follow us 

 all the way through, and we will everywhere deceive ourselves by our own 

 words and terms. Whenever a man or a child has learned the absolute 

 simplicity of these elements of nature, he has already learned the best 

 half of all we know about it. 



With so few simple primary elements to deal with in mere physics, it 

 would seem as though the race might at least thread tlieir way through the 

 complex movements, actions and reactions, of systems, suns, stars and 

 worlds, skies, storms and clouds, until at last the entire philosophy, amity 

 and harmony of being shall appear as simple as are the materials and forces 

 which manifest and move it. But this is the work of more than one 

 horticultural session. Whoever holds constantly and clearly in mind 

 these few primal axioms, definitions, and distinctions, which lie at the basis 

 of all possible science or philosophy, or human reason, is prepared to 

 investigate and scrutinize facts and phenomena as no other man can. 



Thus all meteorological phenomena must be produced by motions 

 of gasses or vapors, such as air or clouds ; or of fluids, such as water ; or 

 of solids, such as meteors, snow, or hail. And all motion in physics is 

 produced by that cause, wholly unknown to sense, which we call force, 

 attaching some other epithet to it to designate its phenominal mode of 

 manifestation or of action ; but if all forces, so-called, are not one and 

 the same, they are now known to be interchangeable into one and the 

 same force, which amounts to the same thing. Which of these so-called 

 modes of force — whether that of heat, so-called, or light, or gravity, or 

 polarity, or magnetism, or electricity — plays the dominal or primal part 

 in meteorology, or whether any one of them ever acts, or can act without 

 the other, no man can as yet tell. Some ascribe greater meteorological 

 power to heat, and some to electricity. vSome make the one and some 

 the other the primal cause of our changes of weather ; but in a world in 

 which we ourselves can not walk across the floor without producing changes 

 of both in heat and electricity, it is hard to see how storms and tempests 

 could sweep the skies and rock even the mountains without a continued 



motion, taken either as facts of phenomena or as symbols of suggestion and of reason, 

 namely : The direct exhibition or presentation of form and motion in matter to our 

 senses ; the indirect presentation or suggestion of causation through force, and of organi- 

 zation, perception, and reason in the three above-defined modes of life to our higher 

 ralional and spiritual capacities. He who accounts for nature or being as a whole can 

 leave out no one of these six totally different essential elements of known being. Mere 

 physical science knows nothing of even elemental matter outside of form, and can do 

 nothing whatever with any thing but the first two, viz., mere form and motion and their, 

 order, or " law," as it is often very pompously called— just as though dead matter, or 

 mere motion, could make any laws in any proper sense of that term — while all philosophy, 

 in its proper sense, is based wholly on the remaining elements. 



Were I talking on moral subjects I would add, there is nothing that Christ ever 

 really taught, or sanctioned, or favored, that contradicts, infringes upon, or even dispar- 

 ages one single fact or principle as yet known to us, or even supposed to be known in 

 physics, Darwinism not excepted. 



