40 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
A request on behalf of the coming Electrical Exhibition at Phil- 
adelphia for instruments and books was communicated to the Society. 
Mr. H. H. Bares read the following paper on 
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF PHENOMENA. 
If there is anything entirely disheartening, it is to see the few 
landmarks of human achievement disappear before the shifting 
current of opinion, as headlands disappear under the ceaseless 
buffeting of the ocean. It is no doubt a matter of poignant regret 
to the cherisher of ardent theological convictions to see the bulwarks 
of faith slowly undermined by controversy. So, also, to him who 
has built his convictions on supposed demonstrable and irrefragable 
fact, to find nothing unassailable, not even the axioms and postu- 
lates conceded for ages as first principles, on which the fabric of 
science was reared, nor the sublime inductions of Galileo and 
Newton, on which the modern philosophy called natural—the only 
fruitful philosophy which man has produced—has been founded. 
But the course of criticism shows that there are no first princi- 
ples. Nothing is unquestionable. Even the mathematic joins 
hands with the metaphysic. I propose briefly to examine the fun- 
damental grounds of mechanical philosophy, in view of the wide 
divergence of basal hypotheses in recent years, and especially on 
account of the importance conferred upon certain speculations by 
their admission into works of standard reference and authority.* 
To do this aright it isnecessary to go behind the mere sub-science 
of mechanics to the essence and substance of things, as did the 
eighteenth-century philosophers succeeding Newton. The obser- 
vational data which have accumulated since that time by the splen- 
did efforts of the molecular physicists enable us to review and recast, 
with some promise, the primary dogmas regarding the physical basis 
of phenomena. It is legitimate to frame hypotheses on subjects 
which are still unfathomed, but which confessedly do not belong to 
the domain of the unknowable. The distinguished example of the 
authors of the vortex atom would alone justify such a conclusion. 
No entirely satisfactory hypothesis of the atom has yet been 
* Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th Ed., Articles ‘‘ Mechanics,’’ ‘‘ Measure- 
ment,’’ etc. 
