510 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



posed of vortices of subtle matter; at London we see noth- 

 ing of the kind. With you it is the pressure of the moon 

 which causes the tides of the sea; in England it is the sea 

 which gravitates towards the moon . . . Among you Car- 

 tesians, all is done by impulsion; with the Newtonians, it 

 is done by attraction of which we know the cause no 

 better." In 1728, according to Voltaire, there were not 

 twenty Newtonians outside of England. But now, sixteen 

 years later, the mathematical prize questions proposed by 

 the French Academy naturally brought the Cartesians and 

 Newtonians into conflict, and not infrequently the Acad- 

 emy impartially divided its rewards between them. Its 

 last act of homage to the Cartesian system was performed 

 in 1740, when the prize on the question of the tides was 

 distributed between Daniel Bernouilli, Euler, Maclaurin 

 and Cavallieri the last of whom endeavored to amend 

 the Cartesian hypothesis on the subject. In 1744, Daniel 

 Bernouilli declared himself even more Newtonian than 

 Newton, for he expressed belief that matter may have been 

 created simply through the law of universal attraction, 

 without the aid of any gravific medium or mechanism. 1 



With the acceptance of the Newtonian doctrine came a 

 tendency to imitate the mental attitude which had led to its 

 conception. The logic of physical experiment was now 

 more than ever the final arbiter. Newton's declaration 

 " hypotheses non fingo" tended to check the inclination 

 of speculative minds to evolve new electrical theories. 

 Some like Kriiger and Bose declined to formulate any, 

 others sought to explain only specific happenings, and 

 others offered hypotheses tentatively and in the inter- 

 rogative form. 



It might well be imagined that conceptions as to the na- 

 ture and cause of electricity in such conditions would soon 

 become involved in contradictions and confusion. Wink- 

 ler's theory that a solid electrical matter inherent to bodies 

 driven always in right lines from their pores by rubbing 



1 Whewell: History of the Inductive Sciences, ii., 158, et scq. 



