THE LAW OF EQUILIBRIUM 147 



such as this is should have behind it an adequate motive. 

 Has this inquiry such a motive ? 



It is a lamentable thing to have to say, but the truth 

 should out, that from the first day to the last that this 

 search has lasted, scientists have had no motive other 

 than merely to ascertain the bare isolated fact, entertain- 

 ing neither plan, expectation, or hope that the knowledge 

 will, or by any possibility ever can, prove structurally 

 useful. Herschel has been dead for nearly a century, yet 

 in all these years, for all the efforts made to reduce to ex- 

 actness what he only adumbrated, there does not appear 

 to have been a single illuminating suggestion put forward 

 as to how the knowledge might one day be made helpful 

 in the upbuilding of the science, be that knowledge as ex- 

 act as ever it may. 



Newtonians rely on the fundamental sophism that 

 the motions of cosmic bodies are self -existent ; that they 

 are no more susceptible of explanation than matter's ex- 

 istence. Of our sun they say, simply, that he moves. 

 They do not ask why he moves, for that riddle they gave 

 up from the start, supinely supposing it beyond the reach 

 of human penetration. All they dare to ask, or tolerate 

 ethers asking is, ' * How fast and in what direction is he 

 moving !" for this question involves no radical innova- 

 tion which might in the end spell disaster to their 

 cherished prejudices. It seems self-evident enough to me 

 that the Newtonians, in denying the causation of the 

 sun's motion, and in asserting, with ever increasing as- 

 surance and solemnity, that his course through the ether 

 is unique, random, and uncontrolled by any organic uni- 

 fying law, are guilty of a grave folly and are needlessly 

 renouncing in advance the choice fruits of their arduous 

 labors. The only conceivable value the knowledge of the 

 sun's course and velocity can have to science and human- 

 ity, lies in its possible far-reaching correlations, in its 

 constructive potentialities. A sun moving, as they as- 

 sert, randomly, unimpelled, and undirected, can have, 

 per se, no correlations and no structural significance 

 whatsoever. 



