360 
Analyses of Books. 
[June, 
by its “ euristic value.” Like most modern scientists, great and 
small, he has his fling at metaphysics. “ Partisans of induction,” 
yet unable to define and respeCt the boundaries with metaphysics, 
always over their ears in mystics, ethers ponderable and im- 
ponderable, God knows, one boxed into the other, lastly all pre- 
served in a friCtionless liquid — whatsoever that may mean — space 
of four and n dimensions, geometrically an absurdity, meta- 
physically a lie, and intellectually a humbug, and deeply oracular 
in phrases, survival of the fittest and natural selection to wit, 
these gentlemen blaspheme and deny their metaphysicism, be it 
of the revealed or of the intuitive type, as Peter did his Christ, 
for the occasion. 
I have sometimes committed the sin of metaphysics; they are 
the infinite sea from which all finite science rises, and on which 
it must for ever float ; without them we would be savages worse 
than brutes. If the pamphlet moves on the boundary of meta- 
physics and physics until the planets are seen, the book begins 
within the domain of physics and mechanics. Pamphlet and 
book contain hypotheses approved by faCts, theoretical construc- 
tions and mechanical explanations of the visible, measurable, 
and ascertainable, according to admitted laws ; they establish 
probabilities on deduCtive and induCtive bases. 
If the critic had read the pamphlet thoroughly, and had looked 
over those pages in “ Gedanken ” to which it refers, he would 
have seen that I adopt from the Kant-Laplace theory the visible 
nebula, without defining it as a gas at glow-heat, but that my 
hypothesis of the development of our solar system differs largely 
from that of Laplace, that it tells why Saturn is less dense than 
Uranus, and has room for rings and for meteors big as comets 
and small as the atom which was the embryo of our sun in the 
parental nebula. He would have seen that I wrote of the Bode- 
Titius series, “ it is an accord falsely taken in what there is, 
without theoretical foundation, but it attracts our attention.” 
He would have seen that I do not arrive at the conclusion that 
there still remains mass for one or two large planets, but that I 
speak of two and give their elements and positions with an ap- 
proximation which, as predictions with a metaphysical touch, 
may turn out more correCt than did the mathematically-accom- 
plished deduCtive predictions of Adams, and even of Leverrier. 
The book does not begin with an 1 a priori proof,” but with 
an a priori statement of faCts sufficiently striking and curious to 
set thinking “ unprepossessed ” minds thinking, but unnoticed 
before my time. Having thus advertised my work, as the show- 
man the wonders in his booth, to professors, learned societies, 
and the “ infima plebs,” I explain how such faCts originated, and 
prove how they got developed, giving a proposition and a demon- 
stration. Discovery of such a proposition can be therefore not 
the “ subject of a prize theme,” the problem having been already 
solved, which does not exclude that the demonstration may be 
mathematically improved and spun out and occasionally marred. 
