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units to like degrees in a homogeneous mass ? Mr. Spencer Rji 
himself says (of course in another place — p. 223) that “the Motion.” 
Absolute Cause of changes, no matter what may be their 
special natures, is incomprehensible .” Here he means it to 
be comprehensible, and a necessary result of one initial force 
on one homogeneous mass. No doubt we might use the same 
words, only we should mean by them that the cause of all 
apparently automatic changes is the will of a Creator, who is 
incomprehensible beyond what he has told us of himself. 
But Mr. Spencer “ abandons ” him for a variety of incom- 
prehensibles of his own, which can do nothing, and are 
nothing but mere words expressing that he knows nothing of 
any of those processes which he dogmatically calls corollaries 
of persistent force. 
Hitherto he has been inventing processes, not one of which 
could take place spontaneously under the universal laws of 
motion. Next we have some maxims, of the kind which he is 
pleased to call postulates ; not that it signifies much what 
they are called. The first that I will notice is what he calls 
“ the Instability of the Homogeneous,” and sets up as an 
automatic cause of other incomprehensible changes. Of 
course the homogeneous will be unstable whenever new hetero- 
geneous forces act upon it ; but he has got to generate them 
yet ; which he here professes to do by stating their effect after 
they are generated : another transposition of horse and cart, 
or cause and effect, and another contradiction of his own true 
axiom, that “ like (or homogeneous) units subject to a uniform 
force will be moved to like degrees in the same direction.” 
His assertion that “ all motion is rhythmical,” i.e., periodic 
or vibratory, “ if antagonistic forces act, a postulate which is 
necessitated by the form of our experience ” (which, I sup- 
pose, means in English that they always do), ’is simply wrong 
both ways — i.e., as a self-evident or a 'priori truth, and as an 
experimental law of nature. The vibrations of heat and sound 
and electricity are undoubtedly automatic in the sense 
that we know no cause for them but the will of whatever 
power made the laws of nature ; but that has nothing upon 
earth to do with their being “ necessary ” or divinable a priori; 
and they are a very small fraction of all the motions of 
the universe. So far as we know, the universe could exist 
without electricity : at any rate no human being could have 
divined it. And what are the antagonistic forces in all these 
cases ? Plenty of other motions, but not all, are in some sense 
periodic, when there are known causes for it in accord- 
ance with the laws of motion : that is, their rhythm is a 
