188 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



53. But whilst the question as to the true method of 



Recent 



triumphs of physical research is still being ventilated abroad, as it 



atomic view. r J 



has recently begun to be in this country also, 1 the 

 mechanical conceptions of atoms and ether have quietly 

 gained new victories. At the end of the last chapter 

 I related how, in the hands of Maxwell and his fol- 

 lowers, the word " electricity " gradually lost its sub- 

 stantial meaning, so that there remained only the con- 

 ception of a state of motion or stress in the electro- 

 magnetic field, it being difficult to assign a definite 

 sense to the term, an electric charge. That those who 

 were brought up under the ideas of Coulomb and Weber 

 would naturally , regard this as a defect has also been 

 noted. Still more had the substantial nature of elec- 

 tricity been forced upon those who studied the electro- 

 lytic action of solutions and currents, the wandering of 



up as a secondary phenomenon of 

 energy. See Boltzmann, loc. cit., 

 last note, p. 114, &c. ; also, inter 

 alia, Dr R. Pauli, ' Der erste und 

 zweite Hauptsate,' Berlin, 1896, 

 preface. 



1 The discussions which began in 

 Germany in the year 1895 at the 

 meeting at Liibeck, and have, after 

 being continued at subsequent 

 meetings, and in the volumes 

 of the ' Annalen der Physik und 

 Chemie,' come to a kind of stand- 

 still by the exhaustive treatise 

 of Helm on the one side and 

 by Boltzmann's summing up on 

 the other, do not seem to have 

 attracted much attention in this 

 country. Interest in the subject 

 was, however, latterly aroused 

 by two criticisms of the princi- 

 ples of scientific method coming 

 from entirely different quarters. 

 The first, which was of a purely 

 philosophical character, was con- 



tained in Prof. James Ward's ' Gif- 

 ford Lectures' (1896-98), published 

 in two volumes with the title 

 ' Naturalism and Agnosticism. ' 

 The other was an Address deliv- 

 ered by M. Poincare at the 

 Congress of Physicists in Paris in 

 1900. In consequence, the subject 

 of the legitimacy of the various 

 physical principles, such as action 

 at a distance, atomism, kinetic and 

 ether theories, the use of mechanical 

 models, and many kindred ques- 

 tions, have been discussed in the 

 Addresses of Poynting (1899), Lar- 

 mor (1900), and Riicker (1901), 

 before the British Association, with 

 a very emphatic attestation of the 

 usefulness and indispensableness of 

 the atomistic theory regarding the 

 constitution of matter, and the 

 view that a continuous ether is 

 the carrier of all physical actions 

 through space. 



