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force shall be. The empire over which our moral power has 
this command extends however no further than to our own 
persons. Man's mind wishes to raise say any weight not 
exceeding the limit which has been assigned him, and his 
will — commanding a material organization constructed for 
obedience to it in some manner to us unknown — calls into 
operation an amount of physical force suited to the work 
the moral power requires to be done, neither more nor less ; 
for, if the will be so, the weight is steadily suspended, be- 
coming no more than balanced however much it may be 
reduced in magnitude, the physical force, mysteriously put 
in operation within the material organism at the dictation of 
the moral volition, being, in every case, precisely equal to the 
external physical resistance to which it is required to act in 
opposition. How the mind acts upon the material is no more 
a mystery, nor less a fact, than the action of one mind upon 
another ; we know both, we can comprehend neither. 
By this experience of our finite moral power, simply ex- 
panded to comprehend the infinite case of the Divine practice, 
I think we may understand on what principles the work of 
creation and preservation proceeds. Physical force, as I have 
conceived it, is none other than moral power acting — not on 
mind only but also on matter as well ; and, in the case of God, 
uniformly with an intensity of force previously determined, 
and subject to laws which this system takes into account under 
the relations of place and time. 
To estimate the competence of this view of the nature of 
force to get us over the difficulties of physical science we must 
submit the force to measurement, which its definite nature 
enables us to do. We measure different magnitudes of the 
same physical attraction relatively to one another by comparing 
them under like relations of place. Unlike physical attractions 
may also be estimated by comparison with one another. 
Moral forces are unsusceptible of relative admeasurement ; and 
as all forces are originally moral, those which we compare and 
measure must, as I have before said, have passed from the 
moral into the physical character; after which , if a physical 
force be, under given relations, equal to another physical 
force, it cannot, under the same relations, be unequal to 
the same force. But when the relation of place is changed, 
every measurable force practically becomes greater, or lesser, 
as it operates at a lesser or greater distance, the force, as 
we observe it, varying inversely in the duplicate ratio of 
the distance. Now, it is by taking that law into account, 
under the relation of place, that causes and effects are made 
equal, while the absolute forces implicated are at the time un<* 
