THE FORCE BEHL\D NATURE. 359 



In the words of the able American writer I have already quoted, 

 &quot;The conception of force is one of those universal ideas which 

 &quot;belong of necessity to the intellectual furniture of every human 

 &quot;mind.&quot; By no one has the principle for which I am contending, 

 been more clearly and more authoritatively expressed than by Sir 

 John Herschel, a philosopher who united to his wonderful grasp 

 of Nature-phenomena a profound insight into the action of the 

 mind of man in the interpretation of them : 



&quot; Whatever attempts have been made by metaphysical writers 

 &quot; to reason away the connection of cause and effect, and fritter 

 &quot;it down into the unsatisfactory relation of habitual [uncon- 

 &quot; ditional] sequence, it is certain that the conception of some 

 &quot;more real and intimate connection is quite as strongly impressed 

 &quot;upon the humrm mind as that of the existence of an external 

 &quot; world, the vindication of whose reality has, strange to say, been 

 &quot; regarded as an achievement of no common merit in the annals 

 &quot;ot this branch of philosophy. It is our own immediate con- 

 &quot; sciousness of tjTort, when we exert force to put matter in 

 &quot;motion or to oppose and neutralize force, which gives us this 

 &quot;internal conviction of power and causation, so far as it relates 

 &quot;to the material world.&quot; Treatise on &quot;Astronomy&quot; in Lardner s 

 Cyckptfdia, p. 232. 



Man s position as the &quot;Interpreter of Nature&quot; may be not 

 inaptly likened (as it seems to me) to that of an intelligent 

 observer of the working of a cotton-factory, with whose mechan 

 ical arrangements he is entirely unacquainted, and of whose 

 moving power he knows nothing whatever. He is taken into 

 a vast apartment,* in which he is at first utterly bewildered by 

 the number and variety of the movements going on around him ; 

 but, by directing his attention to the several machines, seriatim, 

 be is able to arrive at a classification of them, according to the 

 kind of ivork which each does. Thus he finds one set carding 

 the cotton-wool supplied to it, so that its confused tangle gives 

 place to a parallel laying of the fibres. He would see another 

 taking up the bundles of carded wool, and drawing them out 



* In one of the flax-spinning mills belonging to the Mar^hnlls of Leeds, 

 the whole of the work is done on one floor, covering (I l&amp;gt;elicve) two acres of 

 ground, instead of in ihe usual building of several stories. 



