SOME REMARKS ON THE THEORY OF 

 MATTER.* 



IN the present state of Science, there are few subjects of greater 

 interest than the enquiry whether all the phenomena of the uni- 

 verse are to be explained by the agency of mechanical force, 

 and if not whether the new principles of causation, such as 

 chemical affinity, and vital action, are to be conceived of as 

 wholly independent of mechanical force, or in some way not 

 hitherto explained cognate and connected with it. One reason 

 among many which makes this enquiry interesting is the cir- 

 cumstance that the application of mathematics to natural philo- 

 sophy has, up to the present time, either been confined to 

 phenomena, which were supposed to be explicable without 

 assuming any other principle of causation than ordinary " push 

 and pull" forces, or as in Fourier's theory of heat and Ohm's 

 theory of the galvanic circuit, has been based on proximate 

 empirical principles. 



2. The intention of the remarks which I have the honour 

 to offer to the Society is to suggest reasons for believing that 

 while on the one hand it is impossible not merely from the 

 short-comings of our analysis but from the nature of the case to 

 reduce, as it appears that Laplace wished to do, all the pheno- 

 mena of the universe to one great dynamical problem, we cannot 

 recognise the existence of any principle of causation wholly 

 disconnected with ordinary mechanical force, or of which the 

 nature could be explained without a reference to local motion : 

 in other words, that the idea of "qualitative action" in the 

 sense which the phrase naturally suggests must be rejected. It 

 will be seen from the explanations I am about to attempt that 

 the objection which Leibnitz has opposed to the atomic, and in 

 effect to any mechanical philosophy, namely, that on such prin- 



* Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. vui. p. 600. 

 [Read May 22, 1848.] 



