GENERAL MEETING. 57 
titled “An Examination of the Philosophy of the Unknowable, as 
expounded by Herbert Spencer,” wherein he naively lays down the 
first law of motion as unintelligible except by appulsion. Motion, 
he says, in the absence of propulsion is inconceivable. I have no 
space here to reproduce the explanation evolved out of consciousness 
_ by this reasoner to account for the action of a ball struck by a bat 
after leaving the bat. It resembles in ingenuity and gratuity some 
of the inventions devised to explain gravity. The notable thing 
about it is that here, at this date, is a mind of good caliber, informed 
in the higher schools of learning, which is still of the mental period 
of Aristotle; a mind which has evidently never apprehended in- 
ertia, nor heard of the great contributions to knowledge made by 
Galileo and Newton, by which philosophy was entirely revolution- 
ized. 
The second law of motion, regarding the independence and co- 
existence of motions, on which we occasionally see comments in 
the metaphysical vein controverting its possibility, has long been 
established experientially, Its early experimental proof is attrib- 
uted to Galileo. Yet I recall a pamphlet written and published 
only during the last year by a learned German at Leipzig, the 
theme of which was that ‘the sun changes its position in space, 
therefore it cannot be regarded as being in a condition of rest.” 
This, he concludes, overthrows the entire fabric of Copernicus, be- 
cause the planetary orbits in such case cannot be closed. 
The third law of motion is but formulated reciprocal stress, in 
its modes of compulsion and repulsion, through which mass acts on 
mass to redistribute motion by what appears to be necessary law. 
The stress is necessarily reciprocal, since there is no point d’appui, 
or fixed fulcrum, in the universe. 
We have thus been brought to the boundary of the absolute, 
where all is inconceivable until found out, and where the simple 
data are unexplainable. All examination seems to continue to 
point to mass and weight as the ineffable simple insignia of sub- 
stance standing on this limit. We must accept something as ele- 
mentary fact; what shall we find more elementary? Repulsion is 
still debatable; for, if we make an issue between repulsion and 
compulsion as contradictory primary attributes of the same essence, _ 
or untenable in conjunction for artificiality, by far the greater dif- 
ficulties attach to the former, some of which I have already alluded 
