666 
Force and Matter. 
[November, 
place reasonings that can be adduced in contradiction. If 
he be convinced of his premises, it is quite allowable that he 
should endeavour to convert others to his views. An orderly 
presentment of his argument might attain such objeCt, but the 
course he has pursued never yet convinced any one who really 
has the power of collating, weighing, and considering the 
arguments adduced. Doubtless, the course pursued may 
have had weight with incapable and semi-scientific persons, 
and also with those already possessed by Dr. Buchner’s 
peculiar ideas ; but with those who are conversant with the 
propositions and reasonings to be adduced on such subjects, 
the treatise would be in effect powerless. 
The first chapter, “ Force and Matter,” in which the 
potency of force and matter in creation is asserted and the 
impossibility of there being a creative power, contains the 
pith of the whole work. But it is well to bear in mind the 
teachings of Professor Huxley in his leCture “ On Descartes’s 
Discourse on Method.” He says : “ I am prepared to go 
with the Materialist wherever the true path of Descartes 
may lead. . . . But when Materialists stray beyond the 
borders of their path and begin to talk of there being nothing 
else in the universe but matter and force and necessary laws, 
I decline to follow them. . . . Matter and force, so far as 
we know, are mere names for certain forms of conscious- 
ness.” 
“ No force without matter — no matter without force, 
neither can be thought of per se . Separated they become 
empty abstractions” (p. 78). In other words, force and 
matter are so intimately entwined that without the one the 
other could not be. The author adopts Mulder’s observation, 
“ that forces cannot be communicated but merely called into 
aCtion.” From this it would seem to follow that the forces 
are inherent in mattter, and it would then seem that force 
and matter are synonymous terms. It is possible that in the 
origin, so far as matter is concerned, there was but one con- 
dition, matter or fluid, and that out of it all phenomenal 
combinations have resulted. The conclusion that Dr. Buch- 
ner appears to draw is, that the correlate forces “ are but 
changes in the aggregate state of matter.” “ Light and heat 
are vibrating, undulating bodies.” “ EleCtric and magnetic 
phenomena (Czolbe) arise . . . like light and heat from the reci- 
procal relations of molecules and atoms.” Molecules and 
atoms, Professor Huxley has said, are but imaginative sym- 
bols, and that he who mistook them for real quantities 
would err equally with the mathematician who should so 
mistake his #’s andy’s. At all events, no one has ever seen 
