194 EULOGY ON ARTHUR AUGUSTE DE LA RIVE. 



forces are only tbe causes of movements, which we transform, one into 

 the other at will. Well, is this to say that the world has no other sov- 

 ereign than man, and that he rules as master? Let us see if this is so. 



Newton considered light, heat, electricity, and magnetism as so nmny 

 distinct imponderable fluids. This opinion served as a guide to all the 

 investigations of the eighteenth century and of the commencement of 

 the nineteenth. It was the expression of the truth of the time — was, so 

 to say, the fashion — and it had its fanatical followers, in the first rank of 

 whom was Voltaire. It is now superseded by a theory indicated by 

 Descartes and Huyghens, and which Newton undertook to develop, but 

 abandoned, perhaps because of the difficulties it offered to calculation. 

 This supposes the existence throughout the universe of an elastic, 

 ethereal medium, that is to say, an exceedingly subtile substance, in 

 which float the atoms of ponderable matter. Acting one upon the other, 

 or through internal agitation, these atoms determine, in the ether by 

 which they are surrounded and penetrated, undulations more or less 

 extended, more or less rapid. These vibrations of tbe ethereal medium 

 constitute light and heat, while electricity and magnetism are the man- 

 ifestations of the medium itself. Ponderable atoms, an elastic ethereal 

 medium, and the vibrations produced in the latter by the atoms ; such 

 is the present conception of the universe. It is simple, true, perhaps, 

 said Auguste De LaEive, but who knows what will be thought of it a 

 hundred years from now ? How is it possible to believe that af :er 

 remaining in ignorance and error in regard to these great subjects from 

 the commencement of the world, man, in less than a century," could 

 acquire complete knowledge of all that concerns them and leave noth- 

 ing to be discovered by future ages? It behooves us to be more modest, 

 lest our descendants laugh at our audacity. 



Among all the different manifestations of the ethereal medium, elec- 

 tricity is the most constant, not only in the reactions of inanimate 

 bodies, but also in the material phenomena we observe in living organ- 

 isms. It was hastily inferred by some that electricity was life, but 

 Auguste De La liive would not admit that life could result from this 

 unconscious action of atoms upon ether. He had never seen it mani- 

 fested sj)ontaneously, and believed that since its first appearance upon 

 earth it had constantly been transmitted from parent to offspring. 

 He considered, moreover, that human personality does not exist in the 

 dust of which our bodies are composed. Is matter that obeys eternal, 

 and the spirit which commands perishable? I would rather, he says, 

 believe that the intelligent soul is immortal and brute matter perishable. 

 lie believed the world to have been created and demonstrated «ts a fact 

 of a scientific order, and, by arguments that M. Clausius afterward 

 developed, that it had not always existed; that it had a beginning, and 

 would have an end. 



Ampere, Faraday, and Auguste De LaEive made electricity the sub- 

 ject of profound study, and it was the instrument of their greatest dis- 



