THE FORCE BEHIND NATURE-. 359 



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

 "The conception of force is one of those universal ideas which 

 " belong of necessity to the intellectual furniture of every human 

 " mind." 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 : — 



" Whatever attempts have been made by metaphysical writers 

 " to reason away the connection of cause and effect, and fritter 

 "it down into the unsatisfactory relation of habitual [uncon- 

 " ditional] sequence, it is certain that the conception of some 

 " more real and intimate connection is quite as strongly impressed 

 "upon the human mind as that of the existence of an external 

 "world, the vindication of whose reality has, strange to say, been 

 " regarded as an achievement of no common merit in the annals 

 "of this branch of philosophy. It is our own immediate con- 

 " sciousness of ejfort, when we exert force to put matter in 

 " motion or to oppose and neutralize force, which gives us this 

 "internal conviction oi power and causation, so far as it relates 

 " to the material world." — Treatise on " Astronomy " in Lardner's 

 Cydopcedia, p. 232. 



Man's position as the " Interpreter of Nature " 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, 

 he 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 Marshalls of Leeds, 

 the whole of the work is done on one floor, covering (I believe) two acres of 

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



