Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



meaning — the law of gravitation. ^ The statement 

 that ** every particle in the universe attracts every 

 other particle with a force proportional to the mass 

 of the attracting particle and inversely proportional 

 to the square of the distance between the two " 

 is devoid of meaning — the human mind can give 

 no definite meanings to the words " mass," 

 *' attract," and " force," which do not overlap 

 and stultify each other. The law in every way 

 baffles intelligence. Newton, who invented it, 

 declared that no philosophic mind would suppose 

 that bodies could thus act on one another "without 

 the mediation of anything else by and through 

 which their action might be conveyed ; " scientific 

 men to-day are fain to see that a material mediation 

 of this kind would only make the law still more 

 remote from our comprehension than it already is, 

 while, on the other hand, an immaterial mediation 

 or a fourth-dimensional mediation, such as some 

 propose, would simply remove the problem out 

 of the regions of scientific analysis.^ Again, the 



' See the report of the joint meeting of the Royal Society and 

 the Royal Astronomical Society, November 6, 1919, when Ein- 

 stein's theory was discussed. 



2 It is obvious that the Einstein theory, in which Time enters 

 as a kind of fourth dimension in relation to Space, removes us 

 at once out of the whole field of ordinary scientific reasoning and 

 lands us, so to speak, in a new world. The nature of Space (or 

 of the universal medium, whatever it is) in any region — its 

 possible fundamental accelerations there, its " curvature " or non- 

 Euclidean character, and so forth — is supposed, according to this 

 theory, to vary with the amount of matter in, or density of, 

 that region ; and the movements of bodies arc consequently 



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