232 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. VIII. 



second order from their equations. These results of science 

 are, many of them, realised in natural phenomena taking 

 place according to those physical laws of which our mathe- 

 matical formulse are symbols ; but it is possible that com- 

 binations of colours may be imagined or calculated, which 

 no optical phenomenon we are acquainted with could repro- 

 duce. Such a result would no more prove the impropriety 

 of the arrangement than ignorance of the planetary orbits 

 kept the Greeks from admiring the Ellipse." 



5. Envelopment : Can Ideas be developed without Reference 

 to Things as their developing Authorities ? Summer 

 Term, 1854. 



Early in 1854 Maxwell had read J. H. Newman's 1 

 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. He 

 appears to have felt an inconsistency between the tenor of 

 that work and its title, which set him meditating on the 

 difference between true Development i.e. Education and 

 Envelopment or Self-Involution, as a tendency incident to 

 certain habits of thought. 



He traces the working of this tendency in various sub- 

 jects ending with theology, and then proceeds as follows : 



" Envelopment is a process by which the human mind, 

 possessed with a preternatural impatience of facts and fasci- 

 nated by the apparent simplicity of some half-apprehended 

 theory, seeks, by involving the chain of its speculations in 

 hopeless confusion, to round it, as it were, to a separate 

 whole. 



" Thus Mr. Newman and his predecessors take up some 

 single practice of Christians, and by means of analogies 

 derived from the practices of Egyptian priests, Eoman 

 emperors, or Jewish rabbis, they determine, most precisely, 

 the situation, extent, and exposure of the place of purging 

 by fire, together with all the technicalities, observances, and 

 etiquette of that mysterious region. The convolutions of 

 the brain are very wonderful." 



1 Cardinal Newman. 



