Modern Science : A Criticism 



common attribute of falling into an independent 

 existence which we call " attraction " or " gravita- 

 tion " — and ultimately posit a universal gravitation 

 acting on all bodies in Nature 1 — or finding that a 

 number of different substances, such as water, 

 air, wood, etc., convey to us the sensation we call 

 sound, and that in all these cases the common 

 element is vibration, we detach the attribute 

 vibration, credit it with a separate existence, and 

 speak of it as the cause of sound. But though we 

 may thus think of the shadow as separate from 

 the man, the shadow cannot be separate from the 

 man ; and though we may try to think of the 

 falling or the vibration as separate from the wood 

 or the stone, such falling and vibration cannot 

 exist apart from these and other such materials, 

 and the effort to speak of it as so existing ends in 

 mere nonsense. More strange still is the fatuity, 

 when, as in the case of the undulatory Theory 

 of light or the Atomic theory of physics, the con- 

 cepts thus erected into actualities are composed 

 of purely imaginary attributes — of which no one 

 has had any experience — an undulatory ether in 

 the one case, a hard and perfectly elastic atom in 

 the other. The total result is of course — just 

 what we see — Science landing itself in pure absurdi- 

 ties in every direction. Beginning by detaching 

 the attribute of falling from the bodies that fall 

 — beginning that is by an abstraction, which of 

 course is also a falsity — it generalises and generalises 

 this abstraction till at last it reaches a perfectly 

 generalised absurdity and thing without any 



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