326 REASONING. 



with the notion of angular movement in the lever at all? The 

 case is one of rest, and of quiescent destruction of force by force. 

 Now how is this destruction effected ? Assuredly by the counter- 

 pressure which supports the fulcrum. But would not this destruc- 

 tion equally arise, and by the same amount of counteracting force, 

 if each force simply pressed its own half of the lever against the 

 fulcrum ? And what can assure us that it is not so, except removal 

 of one or other force, and consequent tilting of the lever ? The 

 other fundamental axiom of statics, that the pressure on the point 

 of support is the sum of the weights ... is merely a scientific 

 transformation and more refined mode of stating a coarse and obvious 

 result of universal experience, viz., that the weight of a rigid body 

 is the same, handle it or suspend it in what position or by what 

 point we will, and that whatever sustains it sustains its total 

 weight. Assuredly, as Mr. Whewell justly remarks, ' No one 

 probably ever made a trial for the purpose of showing that the 

 pressure on the support is equal to the sum of the weights' . . . 

 But it is precisely because in every action of his life from earliest 

 infancy he has been continually making the trial, and seeing it 

 made by every other living being about him, that he never dreams 

 of staking its result on one additional attempt made with scientific 

 accuracy. This would be as if a man should resolve to decide 

 by experiment whether his eyes were useful for the purpose of 

 seeing, by hermetically sealing himself up for half an hour in a 

 metal case." 



On the " paradox of universal propositions obtained by expe- 

 rience," the same writer says : " If there be necessary and universal 

 truths expressible in propositions of axiomatic simplicity and obvious- 

 ness, and having for their subject-matter the elements of all our 

 experience and all our knowledge, surely these are the truths 

 which, if experience suggest to us any truths at all, it ought to 

 suggest most readily, clearly, and unceasingly. If it were a truth, 

 universal and necessary, that a net is spread over the whole surface 

 of every planetary globe, we should not travel far on our own 

 without getting entangled in its meshes, and making the necessity 

 of some means of extrication an axiom of locomotion. . . . There 

 is, therefore, nothing paradoxical, but the reverse, in our being led 

 by observation to a recognition of such truths, as general propo- 

 sitions, coextensive at least with all human experience. That they 

 pervade all the objects of experience, must ensure their continual 

 suggestion by experience; that they are true, must ensure that 

 consistency of suggestion, that iteration of uncontradicted assertion, 



