SEQUEL TO THE GENERALIZATION. 123 



mathematicians unwilling to acknowledge a plu- 

 rality of Mechanical principles; and in the most 

 recent analytical treatises on the subject, all the 

 doctrines are deduced from the single Law of 

 Inertia. Indeed, if we identify Forces with the 

 Velocities which produce them, and allow the Com- 

 position of Forces to be applicable to force so 

 understood, it is easy to see that we can reduce the 

 Laws of Motion to the Principles of Statics ; and 

 this conjunction, though it may not be considered 

 as philosophically just, is verbally correct. If we 

 thus multiply or extend the meanings of the term 

 Force, we make our elementary principles simpler 

 and fewer than before ; and those persons, there- 

 fore, who are willing to assent to such a use of 

 words, can thus obtain an additional generalization 

 of dynamical principles ; and this, as I have stated, 

 has been adopted in several recent treatises. I 

 shall not further discuss here how far this is a real 

 advance in science. 



Having thus rapidly gone through the history of 

 Force and Attraction in the abstract, we return 

 to the attempt to interpret the phenomena of the 

 universe by the aid of these abstractions thus 

 established. 



