MATTER AND FORCE. 273 



cult to see how real forces could be attached to ideal 

 )oints. And again, unless each of these atomic 

 forces were attached to some real substratum, what 

 rould keep them separate, or prevent them from 

 :ombIning into one gigantic resultant Force, which 

 vould sweep the universe headlong into Chaos ? 



In short, the whole conception of independent 

 force-centres rests upon insufficient metaphysical 

 inalysis. A force which has no substratum, which 

 Lcting from nothing. Is the force of nothing, but as 

 [it were in the air, is utterly unthinkable. 



But Is this any reason for reverting to unknowable 

 f* Matter " as the substratum, in order that our forces 

 lay inhere in it, and not stray about helplessly .-^ 

 t would be a great mistake to suppose this. Our 

 " forces " may require a substratum, but there is no 

 •eason why that substratum should be material. It 

 [is, as Mr. Mill says, a coarse prejudice of popular 

 thought, to which science has needlessly deferred, 

 [to suppose that the cause must be like the effect, 

 that a nightmare, e.g., must resemble the plum-pud- 

 ilng which caused it. So there is no need to sup- 

 pose that an unknowable " Matter " is an ultimate 

 reality, merely because phenomenal things have the 

 attribute of materiality. Matter is not the only con- 

 ceivable substratum of Force. 



§ 18. We found just now that Force-centres, in 

 order to be a satisfactory scientific explanation of 

 things, required some agency to prevent the indi- 

 vidual atomic forces from coalescing into one. This 

 postulate is realized if the force-atoms be endowed 

 with something like Intelligence, and thus enabled 

 to keep their positions with respect to one another, 

 i.e., to keep their positions in Space. We shall then 

 say that they act at or from the points where they 



R. OfS. r^ 



