Force, Energy, and Will 



2\l 



)hilosophy to be ever demanding demonstration, and never 

 jsting on authority. We may then without scruple express 

 lot only our scepticism, but our positive disbelief in the new 

 jreed — *I believe in One Force' — and we need not shrink 

 !"om entering our protest against the danger of superstition 

 jontained in this credo. The protest seems to me needed, 

 For I fail to see why a belief in a supposed, but really non- 

 jxistent, agent, invisibly entering into and as invisibly 

 [uitting the visible objects around us, should be deemed 

 )ther than superstitious. 



But what, then, is this awful reality of which all known 

 lor knowable existences are but modes ? This force, this now 

 widely reverenced entity, the Alpha and Omega of the 

 Jpencerian school, this Being of Beings, which seems the 

 *eat Pan not only alive once more, but actually seizing on 

 the vacant throne of Zeus, is, in my judgment, a mere 

 igment of the intellect. For ' force ' is but an abstraction, 

 common term denoting the diverse activities of all known 

 id unknown existing substances, and it has therefore no 

 existence, as force, other than as an idea in some mind. The 

 attempt, then, to explain all phenomena by the persistence 

 and transformation of force, is an attempt to explain every- 

 thing by an abstraction. 



This new way of speaking has, not unnaturally, come into 

 Fashion as a consequence of the recognition of that quantita- 

 tive equivalence between successive activities which has been 

 >f late years so happily discovered, and which can be most 

 jonveniently expressed by it. But though it is thus con- 

 renient to express such changes (especially experimental, 

 jhanges accurately measured) in terms of ' a persistent force,' 

 ret all the physical phenomena capable of expression in such 

 teerms seem to me to be also capable of expression in terms 

 )f the hypothesis that bodies of different kinds really exist 

 )bjectively, and have, really and objectively, active powers 



