6i8 



NATURE 



{April 26, 1888 



it ; that it is inevitably a?sociated with unorganized matter, with 

 organized matter, and with sentient beings. 



I am not aware that this view, in the breadth in which I sug- 

 gest it, has been advanced before. Probably no idea is new in 

 all respects in the present period of the world's history. It has 

 been said by a desponding pessimist that "There is nothing new, 

 and nothing true, and nothing signifies," but I do not entirely 

 agree with him ; I believe that in what I am about to submit 

 there is something new and true in the point of view froJi which 

 I regard the matter ; whether it signifies or not is for you to 

 judge. 



The universality of antagonism has not received the attention 

 it seems to me to deserve from the fact of the element of force, 

 or rather of the conquering force, being mainly attended to, and 

 too little note taken of the element of resistance unless the latter 

 vanquishes the force, and then it becomes, popularly speaking, 

 the force, and the f )rmer force the resistance. 



There are propositions applying more or less to what I am 

 going to say of some antiquity. 



Heraclitus, quoted by Prof. Huxley, said: "War is the father 

 and king of all things. " Hobbes said war is the natural state 

 of man, but his expressions have about them some little am- 

 biguity. In Chapter I. of the " Ue Corpore Politico" he says 

 " Irresistible might in a state of nature is right," and " The 

 estate of man in this natural liberty is war. " Subsequently he 

 says : "A man gives up his natural right, for when divers men 

 having right not only to all things else, but to one another's 

 persons, if they use the same there arizeth thereby invasion on 

 the one part and resistance on the other, which is war and therefore 

 contrary to the law of Nature, the sun whereof consisteth in 

 making peace.'" I can only explain this apparent inconsistency 

 by supposing he meant "law of Nature " to be something 

 different from "the natural estate of man," and that the 

 making peace was the first effort at contract, or the beginning 

 of law; but then why call it the " law of Natw-e,'^ where he 

 says might is right? There is however some obscurity in 

 the passage. 



The Persian divinities, Ormuzdand Ahriman, were the supposed 

 rulers or representatives of good and evil, always at war, and caus- 

 ing the continuous struggles between human beings animated re- 

 spectively by these two principles. Undoubtedly good and evil 

 are antagonistic, l)ut antagonism, as I view it, is as necessary to 

 good as to evil, as necessary to Ormuzd as to Ahriman. 

 Zoroaster's religion of a Divine being, one and indivisible, but 

 with two sides, is, to my mind, a more philosophical concep- 

 tion. The views of Lamarck on the modification of organic 

 beings by effort, and the establishment of the doctrine of Darwin 

 as to the effects produced by the struggle for existence and 

 domination, come much nearer to my subject. Darwin has 

 shown how these struggles have modified the forms and habits 

 of organized beings, and tended to increased differentiation, 

 and Prof. Huxley and Herbert Spencer have powerfully pro- 

 moted and expanded these doctrines. To the latter we owe the 

 happy phrase, "survival of the fittest," and Prof. Huxley has 

 recently, in a paper in the Nineteenth Century, anticipated some 

 points I should have adverted to as to the social struggles for ex- 

 istence. To be anticipated, and by a very short period, is always 

 'trying, but it is more trying when what you intended to say has 

 been said by your predecessor in more terse and appropriate 

 language than you have at your command. 



I propose to deal with "antagonism" inductively, ?'.(?. with 

 facts derived from observation alone, and not to meddle with 

 spiritual matters or with consequences. 



Let us begin with what we know of the visible universe, viz. 

 suns, planets, comets, meteorites, and their effects. These are 

 all pulling at each other, and resisting that pull by the action 

 of other forces. 



Any change in this pulling force produces a change, or, as it 

 is called, perturbation, in the motion of the body pulled. The 

 planet Neptune, as you know, was discovered by the effect of 

 its pulling force on another planet, the latter being deflected 

 from its normal course. When this pulling force is not counter- 

 balanced by other forces, or when the objects pulled have not 

 sufficient resisting power, they fall into each other. Thus, this 

 earth is daily causing a bombardment of itself by drawing 

 smaller bodies — meteorites — to it ; 20,000,000 of which, visible 

 to the naked eye, fall on an average into our atmosphere in each 

 twenty-four hours, and of those visible through the telescope, 

 400,000,000 are computed to fall within the same period. Mr. 

 3Lockyer has recently given reasons for supposing the luminosity 



of nebulae, or of many of them, is due to collisions or friction 

 among the meteorites which go to form them ; but his paper on 

 the subject is not yet published. You must get from Mr. Lockyer 

 the details of his views. I hope he may, at one of these evening 

 meetings, give you a resume of them from the place I now 

 occupy. 



What is commonly called centrifugal force docs not come 

 from nothing ; it depends upon the law that a body falling 

 by the influence of attraction, not upon, but near to, the attract- 

 ing body, whirls round the latter, describing one of the curves 

 known as conic sections. Hence, a meteorite may become a 

 planet or satellite (one was supposed to have become so to this 

 earth, but I believe the observations have not been verified) ; or 

 it may go off in a parabola as comets do ; or, again, this centri- 

 fugal force may be generated by the gradual accretion of nebu- 

 lous matter into solid masses falling near to, or being thrown off 

 from, the central nucleus, the two forces, centrifugal and centri- 

 petal, being antagonistic to each other, and the relative move- 

 ments being continuous, but probably not perpetual. Our solar 

 system is also kept in its place by the antagonism of the sur- 

 rounding bodies of the Kosmos pulling at us. Suppose half of 

 the stars we see, i.e. all on one side of a meridian line, were 

 removed, what would become of our solar system? It would 

 drift away to the side where attraction still existed, and there 

 would be a wreck of matter and a crash of worlds. It is very 

 little known that Shakespeare was acquainted with this pulling 

 force. He says, by the mouth of Cressida — 



" But the strong base and building of my love 

 Is as the very centre of the earth 

 Drawing all things to it " — 



a very accurate description of the law of gravitation, so far as 

 this earth is concerned, and written nearly a century before 

 Newton's time. 



But in all probability the collisions of meteorites with the earth 

 and other suns and planets are not the only collisions in space. 

 I know of no better theory to account for the phenomena of 

 temporary stars, such as that which appeared in 1866, than that 

 they result from the collision of non-luminous stars, or stars 

 previously invisible to us. That star burst suddenly into light, 

 and then the luminosity gradually faded, the star became more 

 and more dim, and ultimately disappeared. The spectrum of it 

 showed that the light was comjDound, and had probably emanated 

 from two different sources. It was probably of a very high 

 temperature. If this theory of temporary stars be admitted, we 

 get a nebula of vapour or star dust again, and so may get fresh 

 instances of the nebular hypothesis. 



Let us now take the earth itself. It varies in temperature, and 

 consequently the particles at or near its surface are in continuous 

 movement, rubbing against each other, being oxidized or de- 

 oxidized, either immediately or through the medium of vegetation. 

 This also is continuously tearing up its surface and changing its 

 character. Evaporation and condensation, producing rain, hail, 

 and storms, notably change it. Force and resistance are con- 

 stantly at play. The sea erodes rocks and rubs them into sand. 

 The sea quits them and leaves traces of its former presence by 

 the fossil marine shells found now at high altitudes. Rocks 

 crumble down and break other rocks or are broken by them ; 

 avalanches are not uncommon. The interior of the earth 

 seems to be in a perpetual state of commotion, though only 

 recurrent to our observation. Earthquakes in various places 

 from time to time, and, doubtless, many beneath the sea of which 

 we are not cognizant, nor of other gradual upheavals and 

 depressions. Throughout it nothing that we know of is at rest, 

 and nothing can move without changing the position of some- 

 thing else, and this is antagonism. Metals rust at its surface, 

 and probably they or their oxides, chlorides, &c., are in a. 

 continuous state of change in the interior. Nothing that we 

 know of is stationary. The earth as a whole seems so at first 

 sight, but its surface is moving at the rate of some seventeen miles 

 a minute at the equator ; and standing at either of the Poles — an 

 experiment which no one has yet had an opportunity of trying — 

 a man would be turned round his own axis once in every twenty- 

 four hours, while the earth's motion round the sun carries us 

 through space more than a million and a half of miles a day. 



The above changes produce motion in other things. The 

 earth pulls the sun and planets, and in different degrees at 

 different portions of its orbit. 



Before I pass from inorganic to organized matter I had better 

 deal with what may perhaps strike you as the most difficult part of 

 my subject, viz. light. Where, you may say, is there antagonism 



