EXAMINATION OF ANTINOMIES. 533 
264. Mill, in his Chapter on Fallacies of Simple Inspection, very properly controverts 
the proposition, that whatever is inconceivable must be false. Some of his reasoning, how- 
ever, is not very conclusive. Take, for example, the following passages. 
265. ‘ Rather more than a century and a half ago, it was a philosophical maxim, dis- 
puted by no one, and which no one deemed to require any proof, that ‘a thing cannot act 
where it is not.’ With this weapon the Cartesians waged a formidable war against the 
theory of gravitation, which, according to them, involving so obvious an absurdity, must 
be rejected im /imine ; the sun could not possibly act upon the earth, not being there. It 
was not surprising that the adherents of the old systems of astronomy should urge this 
objection against the new; but the false assumption imposed equally upon Newton him- 
self, who in order to turn the edge of the objection, imagined a subtle ether which filled 
up the space between the sun and the earth, and by its intermediate agency was the proxi- 
mate cause of the phenomena of gravitation. . . . 
266. “ No one now feels any difficulty in conceiving gravity to be, as much as any 
other property is, ‘innate, inherent, and essential to matter,’ nor finds the comprehension 
of it facilitated in the smallest degree by the supposition of an ether; nor thinks it at all 
incredible that the celestial bodies can and do act where they, in actual bodily presence, 
are not. ‘To us it is not more wonderful that bodies should act upon one another, ‘ with- 
out mutual contact,’ than that they should do so when in contact; we are familiar with 
both these facts, and we find them equally inexplicable, but equally easy to believe. . . . 
267. “It is strange that any one, after such a warning, should rely implicitly upon the 
evidence, a priori, of such propositions as these, that matter cannot think; that space, or 
extension, is infinite; that nothing can be made out of nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). 
Whether these propositions are true or no, this is not the place to determine, nor even 
whether the questions are soluble by the human faculties. But such doctrines are no 
more self-evident truths than the ancient maxim that a thing cannot act where it is not, 
which probably is not now believed by any educated person in Europe.” * 
268. This whole course of argument rests so evidently on ambiguity of definition, that 
it furnishes an admirable exemplification of the origin of all antinomies. No one ever 
questioned the statement that force can be transmitted from one point to another, and the 
fact of such transmission does not prove that a thing can act where it is not. In machi- 
nery that is worked by steam, the steam acts “ where it is,” on the piston of the engine, 
but its force may be conveyed through a series of mechanical means, and finally used at a 
point very remote from the boiler. An electro-magnetic battery acts ‘where it is,” on 
the wire at a telegraph-station, but the force that it communicates may be conducted thou- 
* Mill’s Logic, pp. 461, 462. 
