296 
Abstract 
Force in no 
Direction. 
transcendental truth, “the ultimate of ultimates," but sinks 
into a mere consequence of Newton's laws ; like the elliptic 
orbits of the planets, which are a necessary consequence of 
gravity and of whatever gave them their initial impulse ; which 
also Mr. Spencer thinks he can dispense with, though he 
several times rightly says that a single uniform force of that 
kind could only produce uniform motion in one direction — i.e. 
towards the centre of gravity of the universe (287 and 481). 
Therefore he has failed utterly on his very first proposition, 
and his whole case is gone. For, even if he could prove that 
everything may follow from the conservation of force, yet, 
until he proves that to be an a priori necessity, and not a 
law of nature which required a prime cause to make and 
to maintain it, his philosophy is nowhere, and can only be 
reconciled with truth and common sense in the same way as he 
“ reconciles " religion with science. 
Moreover, he seems to forget that force must act in some 
particular direction or directions before it can “persist" or 
be transformed into any other directions and kinds of force. 
Abstract force in no particular direction is nonsense. And 
indeed, as soon as he begins the real business of cosmogony, 
he does begin with the definite force of universal attrac- 
tion commonly called gravity, and it is material to see how 
he generates and deals with it. Many philosophers, from 
Newton downwards, have tried in vain to discover a physical 
cause of gravity, acting equally through a vacuum and the 
densest matter, according to the well-known law of distance, 
and with the standard intensity, which could by no conceivable 
possibility be ascertained except from experience, — a fact 
which Mr. Spencer entirely ignores. They have all been 
wasting their time even more than the explorers of the con- 
servation of force did in not waiting for Mr. Spencer, who 
does the whole job for them in three lines : — “Matter cannot 
be conceived except as manifesting forces of attraction and 
repulsion By a higher abstraction results the concep- 
tion of attractive and repulsive forces pervading space" 
(p. 224). And that is all : not the smallest scrap of a reason 
why there should be any attractive or repulsive forces, and 
what; or why the atoms of the universe should not have 
existed for any length of time in a state of perfect 
indifference as to approaching each other. Of course he 
allows atoms, ever so diffused, to be matter (224). He is 
continually saying that he has shown each force in suc- 
cession to be a “ corollary," or some other kind of offshoot, 
of his persistent force, which we now find to be gravity — or 
