54 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
by logical conclusions. Without this, contact would be absolute 
and instantaneous at first impact. As hardness,involves impen- 
etrability, absolute destruction of motion on the instant must ensue; 
that is, motion and no motion at consecutive instants of time; a 
discontinuity unknown to experience, and known to be inconsistent 
with the nature of motion and of time. This argument from breach 
of continuity is due to Leibnitz. Conversion into heat motion is 
excluded, heat being a mode of motion of the entire atom. More- 
over, the destroyed motion has to be recreated instantaneously in 
new directions, for destruction of energy cannot be postulated. 
This geometrically angular motion is also unknown to experience, 
for all deflected bodies pass by continuity from motion in one direc- 
tion into a new direction, and, so far as we can see, must do so. 
These discontinuities in translatory relations are therefore put aside, 
not because they are inconceivable, but as illogical and non-experi- 
ential. Simple repulsion by contact without occult intervention is 
a false suggestion, and we find that we get the pseudo-conception 
from our false observation of what occurs in the collision of sensible 
masses, somewhat as we make a false observation and generalization 
about material continuity, or about tension, from a superficial per- 
ception of matter; thus creating concepts from supposed experi- 
ence which can have no true objective counterparts. I shall recur 
later to a possible derivative basis for repulsion. 
It is remarkable that to Newton we owe the final establishment 
of the majority of those fundamental and universal truths which by 
simplicity and generality seem to touch the absolute; that is, more 
than to any and all other philosophers combined. Thus, of the six 
ultimate generalizations, four were formulated and placed on an 
impregnable basis by Newton: the three laws of motion and the 
law of gravitation. All of these were inconceivable when first pro- 
mulgated, were hotly controverted on the metaphysical plan, were 
finally established experientially, and are now generally accepted 
as axiomatic by the modern mind, except for sporadic reversions 
which appear now and then to deny their actuality and reassert 
their inconceivability. The remaining two universal inductions 
are the collective group of axioms formulating the relations of ex- 
tension—the only enduring remnant of the Greek philosophy—and 
the law of the conservation and unity of energy, unperceived in 
Newton’s time in its generality, though taught as a dogma by the 
