2() .4 Yorkshire Rector of the Eighteenth Century. 



This scheme of the immateriality of matter, as it may be 

 called, or rather the mutual penetration of matter, first occurred 

 to Mr. Michel! on reading Baxter on the Immateriality of the 

 Soul. He found that this author's idea of matter was, that 

 it consisted, as it were, of bricks, cemented together by an 

 immaterial mortar. These bricks, if he would be consistent 

 to his own reasoning, were again composed of less bricks, 

 cemented, likewise, by an immaterial mortar, and so on ad 

 infinitum. This putting Mr. Michell upon the consideration 

 of the several appearances of Nature, he began to perceive that 

 the bricks were so covered with this immaterial mortar, that 

 if they had any existence at all, it could not possibly be per- 

 ceived, every effect being produced, at least, in nine instances 

 in ten certainly, and probably in the tenth also, by this 

 immaterial, spiritual and penetrable mortar. Instead, there- 

 fore, of placing the world upon the giant, the giant upon the 

 tortoise, and the tortoise upon he could not tell what, he placed 

 the world at once upon itself ; and finding it still necessary, 

 in order to solve the appearances of Nature, to admit of 

 extended and penetrable immaterial substance, if he main- 

 tained the impenetrability of matter ; and observing further, 

 that all we perceive by contact is this penetrable immaterial 

 substance and not the impenetrable one, he began to think 

 he might as well admit of penetrable material, as well as pene- 

 trable immaterial substance, especially as we know nothing 

 more of the nature of substance, than that it is something that 

 supports properties, which properties may be whatever we 

 please, provided they be not inconsistent with each other ; 

 that is, do not imply the absence of each other. This by no 

 means seemed to be the case in supposing two substances to 

 be in the same place at the same time, without excluding each 

 other ; the objection to which is only derived from the resistance 

 we meet with to the touch, and is a prejudice that has taken 

 its rise from that circumstance, and is not unlike the prejudice 

 against the Antipodes, derived from the constant experience 

 of bodies falling, as we account it, downwards.'* 



Like the philosophers of his day, Michell believed in the 

 Newtonian theorj' of light, that it was due to the projection 

 of corpuscles from a luminous source. He suggested that the 

 twinkling of the fixed stars may arrive from the small number 

 of such corpuscles received by the eye, perhaps only a few per 

 second. These speculations acquire much interest as ' a 

 curiously definite foreshadowing of the work on electric radio- 



* Priestley, op. cit. pp. 392-3. As Professor Whittaker has pointed 

 out, Faraday's suggestion that ' an ultimate atom inay be nothing else 

 than a field of force — electric, magnetic and gravitational — surrounding a 

 point centre, is substantially the view of Michell and Boscovich. History 

 of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (1910), p. 217. 



Naturalist, 



