242 Researches in the Theory and Calculus of Operations, 



Digression 1. Modern experimental philosophy has hi- 

 therto been, and unfortunately still is, conducted on statical 

 principles alone. Under this method everything, every phe- 

 nomenon, is weighed and measured, and classified; the dead 

 results being strung on a thread of antecedents and conse- 

 quents, like night invariably followed by day, with habit for 

 interpreter of the connexion. A true method of theorising 

 has scarcely dawned upon us. Anything like an available 

 notion of cause is positively repudiated. The shrine of the 

 protean god, Force, attracts devotees few and far between, 

 and is glanced at askance by those who profess to be wise in 

 their day. The fundamental conceptions of space and time 

 are stifled in darkness that cannot be felt; are, in fact, be- 

 lieved to be created by each customer at his own convenience 

 for his own use, and to perish as soon as attention to their 

 content ceases. Space is the relation of the simultaneity, 

 Time is the relation of the succession of phenomena, and 

 Cause is the possibility of sensation (possibly)! Lucid defi- 

 nitions, perhaps. Science has become a kind of thimble- 

 rigging; it asks not a god to annihilate both space and time, 

 but evolves from the depths of its own consciousness, or the 

 levels of its shallowness, the innate ideas or talismanic words 

 which shall transport the subject or the object from place to 

 place without traversing the distance between. The futile 

 attempts to banish m etaphysical inquiries from the tapis have 

 merely changed the venue, and the so-called laws of nature 

 are as much metaphysical entities as the categories of Kant, 

 the ideal patterns of Plato, or the pure being of Hegel. We 

 have dethroned King Stork; but how long shall we remain 

 uneasily perched upon King Log? No wonder if some lose 

 foothold and plunge into the cold and shoreless ocean of 

 scepticism. It will not do to stop here; the inquisitive mind 

 seeks to become better satisfied, and calls for a change of 

 method, which is here attempted by the adoption of dyna- 

 mical principles in reasoning. 



It would appear that the notion of matter, unless trans- 



