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Cod made physical as the due sequence of His geometrical conceptions, by 
acting from minute to minute with measurable exactitudes suited to the 
variable relations of matter with respect to time and place. This second 
part of my doctrine was left in outline, and Mr. Reddie has mistaken its 
incompleteness for confusion. He represents me as attacking the doctrine of 
gravitation, and as assimilating it with heat ; whereas I teach that each of 
the two is the attraction of a matter sui generis , one enormously greater than 
the other, while I profess entire allegiance to the laws of Newton. I have 
satisfied myself, and so said, that gravitation has nothing in its nature more 
than any other attraction to entitle it to be called accelerating ; and Mr. 
Reddie, by adducing the language of dynamical writers, as they do that of 
Galileo, only perpetuated to the force one unnecessary isolation, just as in 
our own times Faraday wished, by getting rid of conservation, to give it 
another. Perfect simplicity — the only foundation for action worthy of 
Almighty intelligence and power — requires the resolution of all the excep- 
tions supposed by science among general principles before we can rest satisfied 
our knowledge is unquestionably that of nature’s truth. Such at least is the 
conviction on which I based my present investigation, and which I am far 
from seeing any reason to alter. Mr. Reddie is not sanguine with respect to 
profound fundamental discovery. He does not think “ men will ever be able 
to understand the method in which God has created matter ” ; and yet he is 
of opinion that to do so is “perhaps not more difficult than to understand 
how we can get this solid table by a pure spiritual conception into the mind.” 
I do not believe that man is to be “ continually baffled in his attempts to 
penetrate into the nature of even the very simplest things ” ; nor do I think 
it has hitherto been always the case, of which the results of gravitation 
afford us an appreciable example, although doubtless it, and every demon- 
stration deduced from premisses not at the root of physical causation, 
labours under a consequent disadvantage. There is, and must remain, a 
longing desire to know the cause of gravitation, as well as its laws, and the 
position that cause holds in the general scheme of nature ; but the want of 
that knowledge will not shake our faith in its having some place in nature 
into which it will be some day accurately fitted. It is reasonable to suppose 
that if we had only discovered nature’s beginning long ago, we should not 
have failed, as we have done hitherto, in understanding generally “ her very 
simplest things,” for we might then have traced her step by step, as we do 
her gravitation, without ever parting company. We have now made a 
beginning, recommended by its simplicity, and I still see no interruption to 
onward progress ; this I think is made out in my original text. 
Mr. Warington has so misunderstood my theory of the formation of matter, 
and of its perception by the mind of man, as to imagine it makes some pre- 
tension to identity between the Divine and human minds. In this deduction 
of Pantheism he stands apart from my other critics, and I rejoice to believe 
he also will soon perceive that he has drawn his conclusion from mistaken 
premisses. The human mind comes into existence as one of God’s creatures, 
with its capacity for conceptions just that which its Creator has made it, and 
