GENERAL MEETING. 47 
its only manifestations. This we call force—the inscrutable agent 
of phenomena—and this I take to be the true Newtonian concep- 
tion, as evinced by his maturest conclusions, expressed in query 31 
appended to his Optics. (B. 3, 2d Ed., 1717.) 
So far as weight goes, it was generalized by Newton to be a 
reciprocal force or stress, operative without limit on the law which 
inheres in radial space relations—the inverse square of the dis- 
tance. The term operative means effective upon mass, namely, 
bridging the discontinuity. Gravity is the typical attractive foree— 
vis centripeta. The relation is mutual by the law of action and 
reaction, and amounts to a universal tension among particles, con- 
trolling all matter everywhere into orderly movements and relations. 
This is what we postulate from observation, on the Newtonian plan 
of naming simply what we see. The notion, however, of action at 
a distance has encountered a metaphysical difficulty in many minds, 
from the preconception derived from ordinary experience that all 
affections or stresses must proceed through an intermediary connec- 
tion, deemed continuous. Even Newton made concession to this 
prejudice in his oft-quoted letter to Bentley. That there is really 
no such continuity in any mode of connection known is demonstra- 
ble, and the notion itself that the fancied continuity of some rare 
effluvium could in any way aid the mechanics of the problem is 
chimerical. Clerk-Maxwell, moreover, has shown (Nature, Vol. 7, 
p- 324; Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 3, p. 63) that action at a 
distance is as necessarily implied in repulsion as in attraction, so 
that theories of repulsion do not aid conception. Ability or ina- 
bility to conceive, furthermore, is not held even by the metaphysi-: 
cians to be a criterion of objective truth. Such truths exist inde- 
pendent of the conceiving mind. The conceiving organ was evolved 
by experience, and conception develops with attention. The first 
law of motion was wholly inconceivable to the contemporaries of 
Galileo, and we find such instances even now. Thus, while plain 
truths are inconceivable until established, some utter absurdities 
have been deemed conceivable, as, for instance, vacuity of two 
dimensions. State of mind, then, is no measure of external truth.* 
* In this connection, to illustrate how entirely a matter of opinion or pre- 
judice or culture is this notion of conceivability, I quote from a letter 
