382 



CHAPTER V. 



THE ATOMIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



Recapitula- 

 tion. 



IN the last chapter I have shown how, under the influence 

 of the Newtonian philosophy, the ancient but indefinite 

 ideas of Attraction and Repulsion acquired a definite 

 meaning, and how at least so far as cosmical phenom- 

 ena are concerned the Newtonian Gravitation formula 

 was made the foundation of very successful explanations l 



1 I use the word explanation in 

 conformity with the popularly ac- 

 cepted meaning of the term. It is, 

 however, well to remark here that, in 

 the course of our century and greatly 

 owing to the influence of the exact 

 scientific spirit, a change is being 

 gradually introduced into language, 

 which will assist in conveying more 

 correct views as to the objects of 

 science. In England the meta- 

 physical interest has been so long 

 banished from scientific literature, 

 the part also which experiment and 

 observation have played has been 

 so great, that misunderstandings as 

 to the real objects of science have 

 been less frequent than abroad, 

 especially in Germany, where the 

 metaphysical or philosophical in- 

 terest still largely pervades scien- 

 tific literature, though metaphysics 

 themselves may be on the decline. 

 There the definition of the science 



of mechanics (now more usually 

 termed dynamics in this country), 

 given by Kirchoff in his ' Vorlesun- 

 gen iiber mathematische Physik ' 

 (vol. i. p. 1), has marked quite an 

 epoch in the philosophy of the ex- 

 act sciences. This definition is as 

 follows : " Mechanics is the science 

 of motion ; we can assign as its 

 object : to describe completely and 

 in the simplest manner the motions 

 which occur in nature." Inas- 

 much as a large school of natural 

 philosophers consider that it is the 

 object of all exact sciences to give 

 a mechanical explanation of natural 

 phenomena, it would follow that 

 the object of all science is to re- 

 duce the phenomena of nature to 

 forms of motion, and to describe 

 these completely and in the simplest 

 manner. We may feel some re- 

 luctance in assenting at once to 

 this definition. Still an analysis of 



