July 27, 1883.] 



SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



87 



mental effort can we do this. To conceive existence 

 through infinite past time implies the conception of 

 infinite past time, which is an impossibility." On this 

 passage he makes a comment which is nothing less than 

 absurd. " I. that true ? " he says. " I can certainly think 

 a fortnight. Does it take fourteen days to ' think '. a 

 fortnight ? Does it take a longer time to think a fort- 

 night than to ' think ' a week ; and a shorter time than 

 to think a month ? When Mr. Spencer uses the word 

 ' conception/ he is evidently thinking not of ' concep- 

 tion,' but of ' experience! Let us change the word 

 ' conception ' to the word ' experience. " ' To ex- 

 perience ' existence through unfinite past time, implies 

 the ' experience ' of unfinite past time, which is an 

 impossibility. Of course it is. But a conception of 

 unfinite past ' time ' is not. It is simply the thought 

 of time without limit, and is simply what I call a 

 ' private ' idea, the formation of which presents no 

 difficulty." 



Now, all this rigmarole has come about because Mr. 

 Bell has not taken pains to understand exactly what 

 Mr. Spencer and other instructed and thoughtful people 

 mean by the terms they use. Mr. Spencer certainly is 

 not thinking of experience when he speaks of conception, 

 and to change the one word for the other is to make non- 

 sense of what he says. Mr. Bell's failure to grasp the 

 meaning of the passage he quotes has led him not only 

 into this injustice, but into the bewildering and ludicrous 

 criticism he gives. When he began to write about 

 " thinking a fortnight," he should have said, if he wished 

 to parallel Mr. Spencer, that a fortnight necessarily means 

 fourteen days, and that to form a conception of a fort- 

 night is to form a conception of fourteen days ; if he had 

 done this he would have seen at once that such a line 

 would lead him nowhere in particular, and he would 

 have given it up. But he does not accurately follow 

 accurate thinking, so his own thinking about it is mud- 

 dled and confused, and he lands himself in absurdity. 

 As to his remark about a conception of infinite, or un- 

 finite, past time presenting no difficulty, we must say that 

 its audacity would have been more startling had he re- 

 frained from showing us that he makes it on the ground 

 that he can " conceive a million " years in as short a time 

 as he can " conceive a moment," 



Again, he quotes Mr. Spencer as follows : " To say 

 that space and time exist objectively, is to say that they 

 are entities ; " and he comments — " On the contrary, it 

 seems to me that only one of them — ' space ' — is ' objec- 

 tive,' and therefore an entity ; while ' time ' is the name 

 of a thought, and therefore ' subjective.' " 



Surely even common sense might have saved poor 

 Mr. Bell from this blunder ! Mr. Spencer quite plainly 

 states that if space and time are said to exist objectively, 

 then such an assertion is equivalent to saying that 

 they are entities ; whereupon Mr. Bell dashes at him 

 headlong, and attacks a wholly imaginary statement 

 to the effect that both are objective, and therefore 

 entities. 



After a long attack, conducted mainly on the princi- 

 ples displayed in the above examples, it is not a surprise 

 when Mr. Bell tells us that it seems as if Mr. Spencer 

 " could write hardly a line which does not provoke 

 dissent." There is a well-known piece of advice which 

 we cannot forbear passing on to Mr. Bell ; it is a warning 

 that when very obvious objections and very easy 

 criticisms present themselves to the mind in dealing 

 with the work of any man of great and special knowledge, 



it is the part of wisdom to stop and ask one's self one or 

 two questions. Mr. Bell has not asked himself those 

 questions ; he has not played the part of wisdom. This 

 is a pity, for he is capable of doing good work himself if 

 he will only wait until he has learnt to understand other 

 people's. In the book before us he has done bad work ; 

 he has wasted his own powers, and tried his best to 

 dim the lustre of some of the greatest names of the age. 

 Happily, his endeavour is ineffectual ; but we fear that 

 this foolish attempt to make common sense supply 

 the lack of knowledge may give him a false conceit 

 of knowledge which will render of no avail all his 

 intellectual vigour. It can hardly be anything but this 

 false conceit of knowledge which has led him to the 

 astounding conclusion — the drift of his book — expressed 

 in the statement of his belief that Space is God. 



Proceedings of the Institution of Engineers and Ship- 

 builders in Scotland. Thirty-first Session, 1887-1888. 

 April 24th. 

 The most important paper read was one by Mr. 

 Lawrence Hill, on " Collisions at Sea ; How to Avoid 

 and How to Minimise their Disastrous Results." An 

 incident mentioned deserves general publicity. That 

 gentleman, an underwriter, told him that he was going 

 to the Mediterranean on one occasion, and with him as 

 fellow-passengers were two ship masters, who ridiculed 

 the captain in charge of the vessel for his cautious navi- 

 gation — one of them in particular for the captain's ex- 

 treme caution in keeping clear of dangerous headlands, 

 and the other laughed at him for giving so much sea- 

 room to a coming vessel. His friend made a note of 

 these two masters' names, in order to trace their future 

 career, and it was remarkable that the one lost his ship 

 on the very rocks which he had laughed at the captain 

 for giving a wide berth to, and the other's vessel was 

 lost by collision near the place. 



Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and 

 Electricians. Vol. xvii., No. 73. London : E. and F. 

 N. Spon. 



This issue gives an account of the proceedings at the 

 177th ordinary general meeting of the Societ}'. The 

 time was chiefly taken up with a discussion on Mr. 

 Crompton's paper on "Central Station Lighting." 



Mr. E. G. Tidd read a paper on the " Use of Elec- 

 tricity for Theatre-Lighting." Here he calculated that 

 the decorations would last three times as long when the 

 electric light was employed as under the old system of 

 gas. He states that of the London theatres and music- 

 halls lighted by electricity six work from the Grosvenor 

 and four have their own plant. 



■ — •^»tS>^**f-< 



Physical Apparatus for Beginners. — A firm in 

 Dresden offer three sets of apparatus — for galvanic 

 electricity, for influence-electricity, and for acoustics — 

 at the remarkable low price of twenty shillings each. 

 The first of these sets contains two Daniell elements, 

 two carbon plates for fitting up Bunsen or chromic acid 

 elements, a galvano meter, a Wheatstone bridge, 

 an electrometer, an induction coil, a permanent 

 bar magnet, a resistance equal to 1 ohm, two thermo- 

 elements, two connecting clamps, and six metres of 

 covered copper wire. The instruments are small and 

 simple, but the}' are well constructed and work per- 

 fectly. 



